Six years after former ESPN executive Mark Shapiro flatly said the league was not worth $60 million, the NHL has agreed to a ten-year rights deal worth an average of $200 million per year.
The NHL and Comcast’s NBC Sports Group announced Tuesday a ten-year media rights deal that will keep NHL games on NBC and Versus through the 2020-21 NHL season.
The deal is worth $2 billion total according to Sports Business Daily, making this the largest ever NHL television contract. The previous high was a $600 million ($120M/year) deal with ESPN/ABC from 1999 to 2004.
The financial figures may garner the most headlines, but the most immediate impact for NHL fans will come in the form of increased game coverage on both NBC and Versus.
Most notably, all Stanley Cup Playoff games will be televised nationally as part of the new deal. This is a substantial departure from the current state of affairs, where on a given night half of the playoff games are not nationally televised.
When there are “scheduling anomalies” — as Dick Ebersol put it — another NBC Universal cable channel will air games.
Starting with the second round of the playoffs, all games will be exclusive to Versus or NBC, another major departure. The NBA does the same with playoff coverage on ESPN/ABC and TNT, and all Major League Baseball playoff games are exclusive to either TBS or FOX.
As far as the regular season, the biggest news is that NBC will now televise a game on the day after Thanksgiving. NBC will also continue airing the NHL Winter Classic, Hockey Day in America, and its regular slate of games.
Versus, meanwhile, will increase its exclusive regular season coverage from 50 to 90 games, and will continue to air the NHL All-Star Game and the NHL Heritage Classic.
NBC originally partnered with the NHL in 2004. Had the 2004-05 season taken place, the network would have shared games with ESPN. After the season was wiped out by a work stoppage, ESPN bowed out of its relationship with the NHL, opening the door for unheralded OLN to pick up cable rights.
ESPN was indeed involved in negotiations to obtain NHL rights this time around, and was “involved in the bidding process until the end.” According to Sports Business Daily, the network “committed to carry one regular-season game per week.”
Of note, by the end of the new deal, NBC will have aired the NHL for more years (16) than it televised the NBA (12).
Turner Sports and FOX Sports were also involved in negotiations.
(NHL press release; other information from Sports Business Daily; NHL conference call transcript from nhl.com; Mark Shapiro quote from Businessweek)
