Stanley Cup viewership a huge disappointment
All-Sun Belt final put off Canadian fans, while Americans had other things to watch
The Stanley Cup or a crazy, old woman dancing around in a tiger costume?
Honestly, the NHL never had a chance.
Given the choices, it should not have been all that surprising that more people in the U.S. preferred to watch Tiger King star Carole Baskin on Dancing With the Stars (7.04 million) than Game 6 of the Stanley Cup final (2.95 million) Monday. Or that the NFL's Chiefs-Ravens game (14 million) also dwarfed the Tampa Bay Lightning's championship-clinching win over the Dallas Stars.
What was surprising — and increasingly worrisome, if you're the NHL — was that the Stanley Cup final, which was played in Canada but not played in front of fans, was also not watched by many Canadian fans.
Rogers Sportsnet reported that 1.081 million Canadians tuned in for Game 1 and that the audience dropped to just 841,000 for Game 2. Though official numbers were not released for the other four games of the final, sources indicate that the broadcaster drew an average of 1.3 million viewers for Game 6 and never came close to eclipsing the 2 million mark in the entire series.
Two years earlier, an average of 2.7 million viewers in Canada had watched the Washington Capitals defeat the Vegas Golden Knights. Game 7 of the 2011 final, featuring the Vancouver Canucks and Boston Bruins, averaged 8.76 million.
Part of that might have been due to the time of year this year's playoffs occurred. Not having any fans in the building also sucked any atmosphere out of the TV product. But still, you would have thought that after four months without hockey due to the global pandemic, viewership numbers would have been closer to what we saw in 2011 — especially when the NHL released a 24-team playoff schedule that had as many as five games per day.
At first, it seemed like they might.
Game 1 of Toronto's qualifying series against Columbus drew 1.78 million viewers, while Game 5 of the best-of-five series averaged a post-season best of 2.5 million viewers. But as the post-season went on, Canadian teams disappeared. And viewership disappeared along with it.
Toronto, Edmonton and Winnipeg failed to advance past the qualification round. Calgary and Montreal both lost in the first round of the playoffs. That left Vancouver, which lost in the second round, as the only team to actually win a true playoff round.
Without a Canadian team to rally behind in the conference final or final — and with household names such as Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin both out early — it was just the diehard hockey fans left watching. Everyone else seemed to be cheering on the Toronto Raptors, whose average viewership rose 10 per cent from their championship run a year ago, or Toronto Blue Jays (up 23 per cent), or were simply outdoors and enjoying the summer.
And while the playoffs reached 22.2 million Canadians — about 60 per cent of the population — the impact in the U.S. was not
as great. The big markets like New York, Chicago, Boston and Pittsburgh were not represented. As much as commissioner Gary Bettman was happy to have two Sun Belt teams in the final, not even fans in Florida and Texas felt the same.
In 2015, 15 per cent of households in the Tampa Bay market watched the first three games of a Stanley Cup final that featured the Lightning and Blackhawks. This year, with the Dallas Stars as their opponent, households watching the game dropped to just over eight per cent.
The NHL recently tried to lure over casual fans with an ad campaign that highlighted how the playoffs were more intense and more passionate than the other sports. But a video illustrating the physical toll of blocking a shot and receiving a bodycheck had the New York Times criticizing the league for glorifying violence just as TSN released The Problem of Pain, a documentary warning of the dangers of being addicted to painkiller medication.
At the same time, Major League Baseball's season was in full swing, the NBA had LeBron James heading to the final and the NFL was in Week 4.
With so much competition, the NHL has never felt so small, so insignificant. The ratings reflected that — not just in Canada, but in the U.S. as well.
The six-game series between Tampa Bay and Dallas averaged 2.15 million viewers in the U.S. It was a dramatic 61 per cent drop from the previous year, when St. Louis and Boston averaged 5.47 million. It was also the least-watched final since 2007, when 1.8 million viewers watched Anaheim beat Ottawa in five short games, and only the second time in 13 years when average viewership dropped below 3 million.
Turns out that not enough of you cared about a series played between two Sun Belt teams.
Now comes the hard question: if a gate-driven league like the NHL isn't allowed to have fans in the building by January — and if not enough fans are willing to watch hockey over football, baseball or B-listers dancing — what is the point in starting the season at all?
By January, the NHL won't have the MLB or Dancing With the Stars to contend with. But the NBA will be in full swing and the NFL will have begun the playoffs. There will be competition for viewers' eyeballs. Lots of it.
Maybe that is why the NHL has yet to definitely commit to when the 2020-21 season will start. Maybe it is waiting to see if the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic will have gone away. Or maybe the league is waiting to see what else will be on TV.