For a heaving mass of self-professed adrenaline junkies and thrill seekers, Americans tend to play it safe when it comes to their sports preferences. How else to explain our weird aversion for playoff hockey, a nerve-shredding two-month stretch that is almost farcically overlooked relative to the volume of thrills that are dished out every night?
While it’s a mug’s game to try and assign causality to any aspect of human behavior—let alone one as inherently irrational as fandom—the fact that the NHL doesn’t put up far bigger TV numbers during the spring arrhythmia fest is one of the most confounding aspects of our collective sports culture. At the risk of indulging in a sort of giddy hyperbole, pretty much every NHL playoff game feels like watching Uncut Gems after drinking a thermos of espresso. Only hockey is nowhere near as exasperating.
Sixteen of last season’s 81 playoff games (or 20%) were settled in overtime, and four of those bonus-cantos outings required a second OT. The margin of victory in 42 of those playoff battles: 1 goal. And yet, despite everything that hockey’s fetch-me-the-Ativan® interval has going for it, the audience is relatively undersized. Last year’s NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs averaged 1.54 million viewers across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS and truTV, and while that marked a 28-year high for the league, those deliveries were about one-third (32%) of what the NBA served up during its parallel postseason run.
If the regular-season TV turnout is any indication, the gap between the NHL and NBA playoffs may expand further still. Heading into the final days of the 82-game campaign, NHL deliveries were down 13% versus the year-ago period—this despite a massive turnout (9.25 million viewers) for February’s 4 Nations Face-Off finale and Alex Ovechkin’s epic pursuit of Wayne Gretzky’s all-time scoring record.
As much as the NHL keeps giving fans plenty of reasons to tune in, the league remains at the mercy of its cable-heavy schedule. ESPN, TNT and their streaming cousins this season carried 143 games, or around 88% of the national slate, an arrangement that inevitably limits the NHL’s overall reach. Per MoffettNathanson estimates, pay-TV operators closed out 2024 with 46.9 million bundled video subscribers, which marked a 12% drop from the year-ago 53.3 million.
Once a staple in 91% of all U.S. TV households, the legacy bundle’s penetration has plunged to 38%. Even when you toss the 20.8 million virtual MVPD subs into the mix, total penetration has been winnowed down to 54%. If recent churn figures hold up, the total count of stateside pay-TV homes will slip below the 60 million mark before the year is out. That’s nearly 23 million homes shy of broadcast’s current reach.
An ever-shrinking distribution scheme isn’t the NHL’s only challenge as it skates into the postseason. Five Canadian teams have punched their ticket to the playoffs, the most since 2017, and while the prospect of one of them hoisting Lord Stanley’s beer stein after a 32-year drought would be great for the game, the abundance of North-of-the-Border clubs translates to a not-insignificant diminution in stateside market representation. When the puck drops on the Blues-Jets opener Saturday, 31% of the home markets still in play won’t be measured by Nielsen, although a fair amount of top-tier DMAs on this side of the 49th Parallel will be in mix. (That said, at least one Canadian team is guaranteed an early exit, as the Maple Leafs and Senators are set to square off in the first round.)
If this year’s field is diminished by the unprecedented absence of any of the four U.S.-based Original Six clubs, the size of many of the measured markets may prove to be a boon for the NHL’s media partners. While the Devils practice their dark magic a good 40-minute drive from midtown Manhattan, Newark is part of the greater New York DMA, which includes 7.49 million TV homes. Also suiting up are No. 2 Los Angeles (5.84 million TV homes), No. 4 Dallas/Ft. Worth (32.6 million) and No. 8 Washington, D.C. (26.3 million). As a bonus, should the Capitals and Kings advance to the second round, that eliminates two more Canadian clubs—arguably a mixed blessing, as a Kings win would send the Oilers’ superstar Connor McDavid to the showers.
McDavid has already demonstrated that he can move the needle here in the U.S., as was made evident by ABC’s year-ago Stanley Cup Final deliveries. In a seven-game series, duration trumps market demographics, and the audience for Game 7 of the 2024 battle between Edmonton and Florida was more in line with the NHL’s overall entertainment value. Per Nielsen, the Panthers’ 2-1 victory averaged 7.66 million viewers, making it the most-watched Final broadcast since the Blues and Bruins took it to the limit in front of 8.72 million NBC viewers in 2019. (Florida’s win also marked the all-time biggest delivery for a game not featuring an Original Six club.)
Unfortunately, this year’s Final is an all-cable affair, as TNT/TBS/truTV will carry the series. Given all the erosion in the pay-TV space, even a Devils-Kings Final is likely to come up short of last year’s numbers. When TNT Sports hosted its first title tilt in 2023, the five-game Panthers-Golden Knights set averaged 2.63 million viewers, down from the 4.6 million ABC scared up with its six-frame Lightning-Avalanche series the previous year. (Even when you eliminate ABC’s bonus broadcast, the resulting average delivery of 4.36 million viewers per game still overshadowed the 2023 cable numbers.)
If hockey is forever doomed to play second fiddle to basketball here in the States—per EDO Ad EnGage estimates, the NHL this season generated $80.2 million in national TV ad revenue, versus $636.6 million for the NBA—the sport can put up big numbers given the right set of circumstances. And while the NHL’s ratings may never be commensurate with the sheer tonnage of heart-in-your-throat action it dishes out seemingly every night of the playoffs, at least some of the audience shortfalls are a function of the way hockey’s breaks are structured. As TV is rated on an average-minute basis, the twin 17-minute intermissions between periods tend to eat into the overall deliveries, as legions of fans use that downtime to grab a sandwich, drink a calmative beverage or simply pace around agitatedly away from the set.
Then again, it could be that hockey is simply too intense for the general sports-enjoying population. If the dizzying array of pharmaceutical ads are anything to go by—according to the CDC, every 40 seconds someone in the U.S. suffers a heart attack—then perhaps it’s for the best that so many people don’t make the NHL part of their daily diet. For the rest of us, however, there’s no excuse for missing out on the most fun you can have with your pants on.
Sign up for Sportico's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
