Article from the Akron(Ohio) Beagon Journal
ESPN began airing a seven-part series this week on the sport of dominoes, which begs the obvious question:
How long before even that gets better television ratings than the Stanley Cup Finals?
The series between the Edmonton Oilers and Carolina Hurricanes -- which resumes Saturday night at 8 with Game 6 on NBC -- has produced some terrific hockey. Too bad nobody outside of Raleigh, N.C., and Canada is watching.
Two kids playing Jenga in Central Park might lure more Nielsen viewers than the quest for Lord Stanley's mug. A fringe ``major'' sport even in its halcyon days of the mid-1990s, hockey on TV has gone deeper undercover than Donnie Brasco.
• Game 1 of the Cup finals, broadcast on OLN (the Outdoor Life Network), was outdrawn by women's college softball.
• Game 2, also on OLN, was a ratings loser to a rained-out ESPN baseball game that never started.
• Game 3, shown on NBC, lost its time slot in the Los Angeles market -- a region that includes two NHL franchises -- to reruns of I Love Lucy.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, you got some 'splainin' to do.
Yes, the post-lockout NHL, with its rule changes and crack-
down on restraining fouls, has created more offense and excite-
ment for hard-core viewers. It has been all but forgotten, however, by the average sports fan.
No matter how Bettman and team owners spin the abysmal TV ratings, the league must face facts. It's paying for the sins of the past. And it's going to be quite some time before the NHL regains the momentum it built on the strength of a 10-year run culminating with a 5.2 rating for Game 7 of the 1994 Cup finals.
That might not sound like much, but it represented respectability for a sport with Canadian roots.
Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Mark Messier, the transcendent stars of that era, are gone. In their place, the NHL has substituted the grittiness of Cory Stillman, the expansion of the Florida Panthers and Nashville Predators and the open-ice sorcery of Eastern Europeans whose names Git-R-Done Nation can't pronounce.
Hey, I appreciate the talents of Ilya Kovalchuk and Alexander Ovechkin, but it's easy to see why NASCAR and (gulp) Texas Hold 'Em have blown past the NHL in terms of popularity. Pittsburgh Penguins young phenom Sidney Crosby can't mature soon enough.
The seven-game '04 Cup finals, featuring the Tampa Bay Lightning and Calgary Flames, was one of the most action-packed and engrossing series in recent memory. One of its games drew the second-lowest prime-time rating in U.S. television history.
That was before the lockout cost the NHL the entire 04-05 season. How has a league gone from network contracts with ESPN and FOX in 1995 to the cable netherworlds of OLN? Here are some simplified theories:
(1) The 1994-95 labor stoppage dealt a devastating blow to general fan interest.
(2) The NHL expanded too rapidly, ballooning from 21 teams in 1991 to its diluted current 30.
(3) Power brokers allowed middling talent, ushered in by expansion, to hijack the game's speed and creativity with defensive traps and unpenalized restraining fouls. It leveled the playing field, but made the product nearly unwatchable.
The NHL finally corrected the problem during the lockout, but it will take time to recover fans lost by a decade of bad hockey, which coincided with the bottoming out of big-market franchises such as the New York Rangers, Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins.
There's nothing the NHL can do about a small-market finals except tout the ample skills of the Oilers and Hurricanes. It can, though, do everything possible to get back on hockey-friendly ESPN. (Has anyone watched OLN since Lance Armstrong dismounted for the final time last summer in Paris?)
The NHL always will have its regional fan base, but there's no reason it should be smoked nationally by college softball. The game is just too good.
Bettman had better get his houses in order or prepare to watch them tumble like dominoes.
Kinda sad to read this. My thought is that people are missing some good hockey. Even though I hate both teams, I still gotta watch. Any thoughts of why hockey gets such low ratings?
ESPN began airing a seven-part series this week on the sport of dominoes, which begs the obvious question:
How long before even that gets better television ratings than the Stanley Cup Finals?
The series between the Edmonton Oilers and Carolina Hurricanes -- which resumes Saturday night at 8 with Game 6 on NBC -- has produced some terrific hockey. Too bad nobody outside of Raleigh, N.C., and Canada is watching.
Two kids playing Jenga in Central Park might lure more Nielsen viewers than the quest for Lord Stanley's mug. A fringe ``major'' sport even in its halcyon days of the mid-1990s, hockey on TV has gone deeper undercover than Donnie Brasco.
• Game 1 of the Cup finals, broadcast on OLN (the Outdoor Life Network), was outdrawn by women's college softball.
• Game 2, also on OLN, was a ratings loser to a rained-out ESPN baseball game that never started.
• Game 3, shown on NBC, lost its time slot in the Los Angeles market -- a region that includes two NHL franchises -- to reruns of I Love Lucy.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, you got some 'splainin' to do.
Yes, the post-lockout NHL, with its rule changes and crack-
down on restraining fouls, has created more offense and excite-
ment for hard-core viewers. It has been all but forgotten, however, by the average sports fan.
No matter how Bettman and team owners spin the abysmal TV ratings, the league must face facts. It's paying for the sins of the past. And it's going to be quite some time before the NHL regains the momentum it built on the strength of a 10-year run culminating with a 5.2 rating for Game 7 of the 1994 Cup finals.
That might not sound like much, but it represented respectability for a sport with Canadian roots.
Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Mark Messier, the transcendent stars of that era, are gone. In their place, the NHL has substituted the grittiness of Cory Stillman, the expansion of the Florida Panthers and Nashville Predators and the open-ice sorcery of Eastern Europeans whose names Git-R-Done Nation can't pronounce.
Hey, I appreciate the talents of Ilya Kovalchuk and Alexander Ovechkin, but it's easy to see why NASCAR and (gulp) Texas Hold 'Em have blown past the NHL in terms of popularity. Pittsburgh Penguins young phenom Sidney Crosby can't mature soon enough.
The seven-game '04 Cup finals, featuring the Tampa Bay Lightning and Calgary Flames, was one of the most action-packed and engrossing series in recent memory. One of its games drew the second-lowest prime-time rating in U.S. television history.
That was before the lockout cost the NHL the entire 04-05 season. How has a league gone from network contracts with ESPN and FOX in 1995 to the cable netherworlds of OLN? Here are some simplified theories:
(1) The 1994-95 labor stoppage dealt a devastating blow to general fan interest.
(2) The NHL expanded too rapidly, ballooning from 21 teams in 1991 to its diluted current 30.
(3) Power brokers allowed middling talent, ushered in by expansion, to hijack the game's speed and creativity with defensive traps and unpenalized restraining fouls. It leveled the playing field, but made the product nearly unwatchable.
The NHL finally corrected the problem during the lockout, but it will take time to recover fans lost by a decade of bad hockey, which coincided with the bottoming out of big-market franchises such as the New York Rangers, Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins.
There's nothing the NHL can do about a small-market finals except tout the ample skills of the Oilers and Hurricanes. It can, though, do everything possible to get back on hockey-friendly ESPN. (Has anyone watched OLN since Lance Armstrong dismounted for the final time last summer in Paris?)
The NHL always will have its regional fan base, but there's no reason it should be smoked nationally by college softball. The game is just too good.
Bettman had better get his houses in order or prepare to watch them tumble like dominoes.
Kinda sad to read this. My thought is that people are missing some good hockey. Even though I hate both teams, I still gotta watch. Any thoughts of why hockey gets such low ratings?