The National Hockey League is at a level where its championship series can barely equal the average rating of NBA and Major League Baseball regular season games.
The deciding Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals between Anaheim and Ottawa drew a 2.5 overnight rating last night, down “13.8% from a 2.9/5 overnight for last year?s Hurricanes-Oilers Game Five“. While the game drew a 6.1/12 in Los Angeles, Nielsen overnights indicate that the game was viewed in only 2.9 million homes nationally.
The year-to-date declines are particularly ominous. Compared “with primetime overnights for Game 5 last year, last night was down in both households, from a 2.7 to a 1.8, and in adults 18-49, from a 1.7 to a 1.2.” Last year featured a Canadian team playing a small-market American team, so what accounts for the ratings drop-off? From a market standpoint, there is not much difference between a series featuring Anaheim and Ottawa and a series featuring Carolina and Edmonton — in fact, Anaheim/Ottawa might be better for ratings due to the inclusion of the Los Angeles market. The markets cannot be used as an excuse for this series, as each of the last three Stanley Cup Finals have had match-ups equally bad from a television ratings standpoint.
Is interest simply declining, even among those who were fans of the sport in the past? Is it lingering resentment from the NHL lockout that canceled an entire season two years ago? Perhaps the participants, the Ducks and Senators, were simply not the teams that the majority of U.S. hockey fans wanted to see.
No matter what the reason, the NHL continues to hit a new rock bottom every season. And this season, the three games on NBC are virtually guaranteed to average less than a 2.0 rating. The NHL has never drawn good numbers on television, but to average less than a 2.0 rating for the Stanley Cup Finals is a fate the league could never have imagined.
