The good times continue to roll for the NHL as the Stanley Cup Final posted another viewership mark on ABC.
Thursday’s Golden Knights-Hurricanes NHL Stanley Cup Final Game 2 averaged a 2.4 rating and 4.675 million viewers on ABC, marking the highest rated and most-watched Game 2 of a Cup Final since Blackhawks-Lightning on NBC — immediately following American Pharoah winning the first Triple Crown since 1978 — in 2015 (3.9, 6.55M).
Keep in mind it was only the third Game 2 on broadcast television over that span, along with ABC’s two previous Cup Final series in 2022 and 2024.
Going back further, it delivered the sixth-largest Game 2 audience on record (32 telecasts dating back to 1994) and the second-largest on the ESPN networks, behind Red Wings-Flyers on ESPN in 1997 (4.96M). About two-thirds of those games aired on cable.
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 — though realistically, few if any Game 2s since 2015 did well enough for methodology to bridge the gap.
Carolina’s overtime win, which peaked with 5.8 million in the 10:45 PM ET quarter-hour, increased 88% from last year’s Friday night Panthers-Oilers Game 2 on TNT Sports (2.5M) and a third from the previous Game 2 on ABC, Oilers-Panthers on a Saturday night two years ago (3.56M).
The Cup Final was averaging 4.725 million viewers through two games, up 93% from last year and the highest two-game average since 2015. (As might go without saying, it was only the third Cup Final over that span in which the first two games both aired on broadcast television.) Figures for Saturday’s Game 3 will not be available until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest.
While this year’s Cup Final is a pairing of non-traditional Sun Belt teams, it is the first all-American Cup Final in three years — and the first all-American series on broadcast in four. It has no doubt helped that the games have been perceived as especially compelling.
