Edmonton-Florida Stanley Cup Highlights NHL’s TV Questions

While the NHL’s 2021 media rights deal with Disney and Warner Media helped grow the league’s revenues and TV exposure, it doesn’t solve for a few major lingering issues: How to handle quantifying Canadian teams’ audiences and the lasting impact of southern expansion on team recognizability (to the casual fan) and parity.

Audiences definitely still watch games involving Canadian teams — especially if they’re “Original Six” squads like the Montreal Canadiens or Toronto Maple Leafs. But without a local U.S. market draw or an easy ability to measure non-domestic audiences, NHL TV partners aren’t necessarily rooting for the Canadian clubs to make the Stanley Cup Final.

As a result, the league may not be either, which is tough when you have seven clubs in Canada. But the longer Canadian teams stick around in the postseason, the harder it is to truly quantify TV ratings — hurting the NHL’s ability to negotiate the next media rights deal, and for network partners to sell inventory that puts an accurate value on audiences.

Beyond the Canadian team issue, there’s also the issue of the league’s expansion and relocation to non-traditional, “newer” U.S. markets.

It’s not an exhaustive list of expansion and relocation destinations, but the NHL’s added clubs in cities like San Jose, Anaheim, Tampa, Miami, Dallas, Raleigh, Nashville, Denver, Las Vegas and Seattle in the last 30ish years, while also losing a Phoenix team to Utah and an Atlanta team to Winnipeg.

That’s a significant number of teams (not counting others like Minnesota, Columbus and Ottawa, too), and many of them have seen significant success over the years. That’s a good sign for the league’s competitiveness in many ways. But to a more casual viewer, it can also make the playoffs look like a parity-laden pool of expansion teams, even if that’s not actually true (save for Vegas’s run of success since joining in 2017-18).

This is a long way of getting to those two problems clashing with one another again in this year’s Stanley Cup Final — a matchup between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers.

Now, I’ll fully admit to being a bit wrecked by this matchup personally, as a Rangers fan, which certainly got me thinking about these issues to begin with: Is Florida (or another southern state) vs. Canada a nightmare for the NHL? Recent Stanley Cup ratings may indicate as much.

An average of 2.4 U.S. viewers per game watched the Tampa Bay Lightning beat the Canadiens in five games back in 2021. The 2007 Cup between the Anaheim Ducks and Ottawa Senators averaged just 1.7 million U.S. viewers per game. In 2006, the Carolina Hurricanes and Oilers drew an average of 2.8 million the year after the infamous 2005 lockout killed that entire season.

From a U.S. TV perspective, Canada vs. Southern State TBD seems to draw around the same as matchups between two southern teams, too. Florida vs. Vegas averaged 2.6 million viewers last year, and Tampa Bay vs. Dallas had just 2.0 million in 2020. Even the Los Angeles Kings vs. New Jersey Devils series in 2012 only drew 3.0 million per game, amazingly, despite the markets you’re assuming are attached there.

None of this is to suggest that the NHL shouldn’t be invested in expanding the game to new markets, that the Canadian teams shouldn’t exist, or that the southern teams shouldn’t either. To be honest, the 2004-05 lockout set the sport back a decade in the popular consciousness in the U.S., and new markets and better TV exposure were (and are) the easiest ways to regain that momentum.

The question, though, is what’s the price of it all from a TV perspective?

At this point, the state of Florida’s appeared in five straight Stanley Cups (three for Tampa, two for Florida, much — once again — to my own chagrin). Teams in Nevada, Texas, Tennessee and California have all made trips in the last decade, too.

Despite the aforementioned ratings issues, there’s a long-term gain attached to these non-traditional hockey markets finding success and notoriety in their respective markets because it grows local interest in the sport which leads to ticket sales, more kids watching and playing, etc. The ratings potentially come down the road. And if more people care about hockey, then ultimately, it’s a win for the NHL.

Where the issue for the league arises is how it may want to better leverage these “non-traditional” and/or Canada-heavy matchups (in this case, both) to make sure its teams and players are marketed to the wider U.S. audience so they are more familiar with the NHL’s on-ice product and associated personalities.

A YouGov poll ranks the Oilers’ Connor McDavid — the best player in hockey — outside the 1,000 most popular athletes in the U.S. Mark Cuban once said in 2019 that he couldn’t tell you who McDavid was or where he played. Hyperbole or not, it raises the point that the league has had a selective few players (Sidney Crosby, Wayne Gretzky…) break through the national consciousness the way athletes in the other Big 4 sports do. That’s a mistake, especially if you’re pushing parity and expansion as ways to grow the game.

So while there’s a chance this series is a “nightmare” for the NHL from a ratings standpoint, there’s still work that can be done right now on a national level to make sure the next Canada vs. Southern Team matchup doesn’t have to be.

The NHL could work with brands and its broadcast partners to spotlight what’s a star-heavy series between the Oilers’ McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Evan Bouchard, and the Panthers’ Matthew Tkachuk, Alex Barkov and Sam Reinhart (among many other big names on both teams). Social video should be littered with sponsored NHL videos featuring these athletes. Yet there’s only been a handful (about 30) of sponsored videos involving the in the past 30 days according to Tubular Labs data, and many were local ads in Canada.

Social video may not be TV, exactly. But considering how much YouTube is taking over U.S. watch-time, especially among younger viewers, it would suggest that social video is exactly where the NHL should be in the hopes of creating a national conversation around its product that converts unaffiliated audiences into viewers. What are “just” likes and comments now could be the big differences when it comes to the next media negotiation at the end of the decade. And as live sports eats a larger and larger part of the TV landscape, hockey should want to position itself as well as it can.