Welcome back to “The Needle,” a new ratings-focused column on Sports Media Watch that will break down the numbers, attempt to put some context behind the data, and discuss broader trends in measurement and television viewing.
Outside of the immense success of the Four Nations Face-Off, which produced the largest NHL-sanctioned audience in Nielsen people meter history in February, the 2024-25 NHL season has not been one to write home about in the ratings. Regular season viewership declined 12 percent from last year, and the postseason has been far worse — with the ESPN networks down 30 percent through Thursday and TNT Sports down 16 percent for its first round games.
The declines come with some obvious caveats. To begin with, the postseason is missing the big-market American teams that have been familiar contenders in years past — the Bruins and the Rangers. Even a short Boston run would likely have made a difference; two years ago, the Bruins lost in the first round of the playoffs and still generated the largest audience of the postseason.
More damaging — at least for U.S. television — has been the presence of five Canadian teams, the most in a postseason since 2007. As Canadian teams do not count toward U.S. television ratings, it is a general rule that even the most popular teams north of the border will tend to be a ratings drag in the states.
Between the absence of big American markets and the unusually heavy Canadian presence, the total number of U.S. households represented in this year’s postseason field is 22 percent lower than a year ago.
This postseason figures to maintain a heavy Canadian presence all the way through the Cup Final. Three of four second round series include a Canadian team — the first such occurrence since 2004 — and given the starpower on the Oilers and Maple Leafs, an all-Canadian Cup Final is certainly on the table. That likely ensures that the double-digit declines will not only continue, but deepen, as the postseason reaches its conclusion.
But that would only be the case in the United States. In Canada, the heavy Canadian presence figures to drive viewership considerably, and a potential Oilers-Maple Leafs final would likely reach record levels. Why should a discussion of the NHL’s ratings ignore the Canadian success story?
That is the premise underlying the NHL’s increasingly frequent references to its “North American” audience in its press releases. The opening round of the playoffs may have declined double-digits on U.S. television, but in Canada it was up 12 percent to 1.8 million — considerably higher than the six-figure U.S. average — and the combined U.S. and Canadian figure was on par with a year ago.
Braylon Breeze, a Sports Media Watch contributor who covers sports media on his website The Breeze Report and on social media, said this week that the exclusive focus on U.S. viewership harms the perception of the NHL’s popularity: “This is a league that spans two countries, not one, as it is perceived, yet the media conversation remains overwhelmingly just focused on the United States.”
The argument that the NHL’s U.S. viewership is only one aspect of the league’s health is correct. Unlike the NBA and Major League Baseball, which currently have one Canadian team each and have never had more than two at any given time, more than a fifth of NHL teams are based in Canada. Nearly all of the NBA and MLB media rights fees originate from the United States, while the NHL’s new deal with Canada’s Rogers SportsNet will pay more — $640 million annually — than ESPN and TNT are paying combined in their current deals. The NBA and MLB are American leagues with a Canadian outpost; the NHL is truly a multinational league.
Thus, any suggestion that U.S. viewership tells the full story of the league’s popularity is inaccurate — especially in a situation where viewership is up in Canada.
So how can it be fair to write about the NHL’s viewership without mentioning the league’s success in Canada?
The position here is that the U.S. and Canada are completely different media contexts and that it is fair to cover them separately. In the U.S., the NHL has an entirely different media rights agreement, an entirely different audience and as a result, distinct priorities, goals, and standards of success.
None of the rising Canadian viewership is occurring on U.S. networks; a record Canadian audience for Oilers-Maple Leafs would be of zero benefit to the NHL’s U.S. partners ESPN and TNT. Consider it in reverse; a potential Florida-Dallas Cup Final would likely be a weak draw on Canadian television, a fact that would not make sense to note if reporting on the NHL’s U.S. viewership.
When the NBA Finals featured Toronto in 2019, it was difficult to cover the U.S.-only viewership without being asked to include the Canadian audience. The Raptors’ title-clinching Game 6 win over the Warriors averaged a combined audience of more than 26 million across ABC and multiple Canadian networks, making it the most-watched Game 6 of an NBA Finals since 1998. Yet that Canadian viewership made no difference for ABC, which had its least-watched Finals in a decade. In fact, touting the Canadian viewership helped paper over signs of U.S. audience erosion that would become unmistakable — and endlessly discussed — in subsequent years.
Indeed, a league’s health in Canada says little about its health in the United States and vice versa. In the U.S., the NHL is a respectable enough draw that is heavily dependent on big market American teams, and negatively affected (like all leagues) when Canadian teams make deep playoff runs. In Canada, it is a national pastime. Combining viewership across the two nations does not change that dynamic.
The U.S. audience may not tell the whole story about the NHL’s popularity, but it warrants its own separate chapter. So long as one does not make sweeping claims about the NHL’s overall health based on its ratings in the United States — and frankly, one should avoid making sweeping claims based on the ratings just generally — a U.S.-centric lens does not seem overly myopic.
Plus: PGA Tour, UEFA Champions League, F1
The PGA Tour has scored some fairly impressive numbers of late, including last week’s 2.9 million for the final round of the Byron Nelson tournament on CBS — the highest since 2017. This year’s numbers were a complete reversal from a year ago, when the final round was the least-watched in more than a decade.
That followed an Easter-boosted 23-year high for the final round of the Heritage and a ten-year high — with a bit of an asterisk — for New Orleans. (The live portion of the telecast delivered the tournament’s largest audience in a decade, but the official telecast window included about two hours of taped programming.)
All three of those tournaments followed Rory McIlroy’s stirring Masters victory, but the good times even extend to before Augusta. The Houston Open scored a 41 percent increase on NBC the final week of March.
It should not be overlooked that the UEFA Champions League is capable of drawing a seven-figure CBS audience in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. The second leg of the Inter Milan-Barcelona semifinal drew 1.28 million viewers on CBS Wednesday, a record for a UCL semifinal on English-language TV, and the kind of figure that a number of sporting events would fail to reach in primetime. Keep in mind that does not even include the Univision Spanish-language audience.
ABC’s decision to carry the F1 Miami Grand Prix instead of the NBA last Sunday of course backfired. The F1 race averaged 2.17 million viewers, one of the largest live F1 audiences ever on U.S. television, but less than a third of the 6.63 million who watched Warriors-Rockets Game 7 on TNT and truTV.
