On one of the most competitive sports nights in recent memory, the NHL stumbled to its smallest conference final audience in nine years.
Thursday’s Golden Knights-Stars NHL Western Conference Final Game 3 averaged 790,000 viewers on NBCSN, marking the least-watched conference final game in nine years (2011 Canucks-Sharks Game 3: 714K).
The Stars’ overtime win faced punishing competition from the NFL Kickoff Game (19.3M), to say nothing of the NBA Playoffs (2.50M) and US Open women’s semifinals (1.55M).
Not surprisingly, viewership sank 43% from Game 3 of last year’s West Final, which faced no notable competition (Sharks-Blues: 1.39M).
While the NFL no doubt played a role in Thursday’s nine-year low, Tuesday’s Game 2 was not much better at just 887,000 viewers (-36%).
Three games into the conference finals, not a single Western Conference game on cable has cracked the million viewer mark since the season restarted August 1.
Shifting to the Eastern Conference, Islanders-Lightning opened with 958,000 viewers on Monday before rebounding to 1.14 million on Wednesday — down 54% and 50% respectively from the first two games of last year’s Hurricanes-Bruins series (2.08 and 2.26 million). Keep in mind that one of last year’s games aired on the NBC broadcast network.
Three of the five conference final games this year have averaged fewer than one million viewers, after each of the previous 24 surpassed that mark.
[Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily 9.11, 9.10 a, b, 9.9]
