The first championship-deciding Game 7 in five years delivered one of the top NHL audiences of the past 30.
Monday’s Panthers-Oilers NHL Stanley Cup Final Game 7 averaged a 3.7 rating and 7.66 million viewers on ABC, marking the largest NHL audience since the previous Cup Final Game 7 five years ago, Blues-Bruins on NBC (8.72M) and the most-watched NHL game ever on the ESPN networks, which did not air NHL games between 2005-21. Ratings will be added when available.
Florida’s win, which peaked with 10.3 million viewers in the 10:45 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered the seventh-largest NHL audience in the past 30 years — trailing the three previous Cup Final game sevens in 2019, 2011 (Bruins-Canucks: 8.54M) and 2009 (Penguins-Red Wings: 7.99M) and the Blackhawks’ three Game 6 clinchers in 2010 (Blackhawks-Flyers: 8.28M), 2013 (Blackhawks-Bruins: 8.16M) and 2015 (Lightning-Blackhakws: 8.01M).
As each of the higher-ranking games involved an Original Six team (Boston, Detroit or Chicago), this year’s game ranks as the most-watched non-Original Six NHL game on record.
As goes without saying, Game 7 was the second-most watched NHL game in the past 30 years to involve a Canadian team, trailing only Bruins-Canucks in ’11. Viewership outpaced each of the three other game sevens to involve a Canadian team, the Oilers’ 2006 loss to Carolina (5.29M), Calgary’s 2004 loss to Tampa Bay (6.29M) and Vancouver’s 1994 loss to the Rangers, which did not include the New York market as ESPN’s national coverage was blacked out locally (5.44M).
After trailing 3-0, the Oilers won three-straight games to force the first Game 7 in any championship series since 2019 — before the COVID hiatus. Thus, it was the first championship Game 7 of the Nielsen out-of-home era, which began in fall 2020.
The full, seven-game Panthers-Oilers Stanley Cup Final averaged 4.2 million viewers on ABC — up 58% from last year’s five-game series on cable and down 9% from the six-game Avalanche-Lightning series on ABC in 2022 (4.6M).
Including Canadian viewership on CBC, SportsNet and TVAS, Game 7 averaged 16.3 million viewers — the second-largest combined audience for an NHL game (dating back to 2004) behind Bruins-Canucks in ’11. The full series averaged 8.8 million across both the United States and Canada, up 85% from last year, when there was no Canadian team in the Final.
The full Stanley Cup Playoffs averaged 1.5 million on U.S. television, up 25% from last year and the most-watched postseason since 1996. Including Canadian viewership, the postseason averaged 3.4 million (+14%), a seven-year high.
