In a recent interview with Puck the Media, Boston Bruins announcer Jack Edwards had some choice words for ESPN.
The former SportsCenter anchor criticized ESPN for its lack of hockey highlights, noting that on one busy Saturday of NHL action, “[t]here was nothing on the NHL” in an entire episode of SportsCenter. Edwards:
Exactly. And those “bozos” are doing their job.
ESPN is a business, and as such is not interested in a subjective intangible like “the passion of hockey fans.” A network that makes programming decisions based on passion will be far less successful than one that makes decisions on actual numbers.
The passion of hockey fans certainly did not help NBC much in 2007, when Ducks/Senators Game 3 set an all-time record low rating on the network. If hockey fans were so uniquely passionate, the ratings for finals such as Oilers/Hurricanes and Ducks/Senators would not have been so far below last year’s Penguins/Red Wings series. Passionate fans tune in, even if the series lacks stars like Sidney Crosby, or marquee teams like the Detroit Red Wings.
Certainly, this is not to say that NHL fans are uniquely fair weather, or fair weather at all. But the passion of hockey fans does not amount to much if they only tune in en masse for an outdoor game gimmick or a marquee matchup.
And of course the same can be said about fans of other sports. Far more people tuned in to Celtics/Lakers in ’08 than to Spurs/Cavaliers in ’07. Baseball saw ratings plummet for Phillies/Rays after the previous year’s World Series featured the Red Sox. Many sporting events have set record lows in recent years, and yet ESPN still devotes more time to those sports. So what is the difference between those sports and the NHL?
The all-important numbers. The lowest rated NBA Finals game ever (Game 2 in ’03) still attracted 5.2% of U.S. television households. The lowest rated World Series game (Game 3 in ’08) drew 6.1%. Meanwhile, the highest rated NHL game of the past 35 years (Game 7 in ’03) attracted 4.6%. If your pinnacle is lower than your competitors’ lowest point, it stands to reason that you will get less attention.
That being said, Edwards was not arguing that the NHL should get as many highlights as the NBA or MLB. But the NHL is not faring much better than poker, women’s basketball or other events he mentioned.
For example, Edwards complained that there was a highlight of the Division II Championship Game on SportsCenter, and not a single one on the NHL. The fact is, the Division II title game drew a 1.2 final rating on CBS — and, excluding the Winter Classic, not a single NHL regular season game on NBC has drawn a rating that high in over two years. Recently, NBC drew a 0.8 rating for a Sunday afternoon NHL game — only one tenth of a point higher than the 0.7 four episodes of Poker After Dark drew at 2:05 AM that same week. And the rating for last year’s women’s college basketball national title game was higher than four of last year’s six Stanley Cup Finals games.
Edwards concludes that “if it were my place, if it were my call, I know where the passion is, and I?d rather have 1% of the audience is totally nuts about the sport, than I?m just gonna? watch it because it?s on.” In other words, Edwards would rather have tiny but passionate audience than a large and indifferent one. He notes that “the people who make the decisions in the accounting department, who see the ratings numbers, are going to go purely on the number.”
While he means that to be a negative, it seems to make perfect sense. As mentioned before, ESPN is a business. Catering to the small, but passionate, may work for a niche network like Versus — but not for ESPN. It should be pointed out that the amount of highlights a sport gets are not based solely on television ratings — if they were, NASCAR would get far more attention on SportsCenter. And other variables, such as whether the sport is an ESPN property, come into play as well. But there seems to be an idea that somehow, the NHL is entitled to highlights and attention — even though its numbers are generally tiny, and even though ESPN does not even have rights to the league.
If the passion of hockey fans stood to benefit ESPN in any way, for example, higher ratings for SportsCenter, then there would be more NHL highlights. But until ESPN has some incentive to start airing more NHL highlights, until that passion translates into something tangible, hockey highlights will remain on the back burner.
