Even on a Saturday night, the Stanley Cup Final continued to set more ratings and viewership highs in Game 3.
Saturday’s double-overtime Hurricanes-Golden Knights NHL Stanley Cup Final Game 3 averaged a 2.3 rating and 5.05 million viewers on ABC, officially marking the largest audience for a Game 3 in the Cup Final since the triple-overtime Red Wings-Hurricanes on the same network — and in the same Saturday night slot — in 2002 (5.48M). It also tied Bruins-Blackhawks on NBCSN in 2013 as the highest rated Game 3 since 2008.
The Golden Knights’ dramatic win, which peaked with 6.1 million viewers in the 11:45 PM ET quarter-hour, trails only 2002 as the most-watched Game 3 on record (dates back to 1994). Keep in mind that the majority of those games, including all-but-three since 2008, aired on cable.
Across all NHL games, it trails only Game 7 of the 2024 Cup Final (7.67M) as the most-watched in the past four years.
Note that Nielsen did not begin including out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020, only began doing so in 100 percent of markets a year ago, and is months into a new methodology that combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes. Those changes will skew historical comparisons, particularly to years before 2020.
Ratings and viewership more-than-doubled last year’s Oilers-Panthers Game 3 on TNT Sports (1.2, 2.33M) and increased 28% and 51% respectively from the previous Game 3 on ABC, Panthers-Oilers in 2024 (1.8, 3.35M).
Game 3 was also the most-watched Cup Final game on a Saturday — the least-watched night of the week — since Blackhawks-Lightning Game 5 in 2015 (5.27M). No other Saturday game in that span hit even the four million mark, with the previous high being 3.75 million for Lightning-Avalanche on ABC in 2022.
Entering Tuesday’s Game 4, the Golden Knights-Hurricanes series was averaging 4.9 million viewers on ABC — the highest for the first three games of a Cup Final since Blackhawks-Lightning in ’15, and an increase of 101% over last year. With Carolina’s Game 4 win, the series is guaranteed to extend to a sixth game this Sunday.
