Mike and I had a little discussion a few days ago, in the comments section of his site, about inter alia (which is Latin for “between beers”) the myriad of ills facing the NHL as it attempts to make some sort of an impact on the average American consumer.
At some point, Mike referred to the NHL as the “fourth” pro league; I pointed out that I thought he was being rather generous to the NHL in that regard. I said I thought there were some numbers on the NHL’s tv ratings performance in the U.S. that made it clear that professional hockey rated far behind things like figure skating and professional rodeo. I promised to try and hunt some of the data down and post it here.
Here is an article from the WaPo dated June 2006 that discusses some of these issues. The Post’s site sometimes requires registration, so I’ve quoted a couple of the more salient paragraphs below:
The big exception is television ratings — a key revenue driver and measure of a sport’s mass appeal — which have gone from bad to worse. The NHL playoffs, mostly relegated to the Outdoor Life Network (OLN), a second-tier cable channel known for hunting and fishing programs and its Tour de France coverage, have barely registered with the American public. NBC’s ratings aren’t great, either.
“You look at the playoff [ratings] numbers, and they have been beaten pretty soundly by poker and bowling,” said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.
To be fair, a quick review of the article suggests to me that its general theme is the overall re-surgence and re-emergence of hockey after the lockout, except insofar as the TV ratings are concerned; attendance was said to be up and many signs were said to point to a successful recovery for the league, at least outside the realm of television. To finish behind bowling, though – I mean no disrespect here to Earl Anthony, but…dude.
Remember a few years back, when Fox had the NHL contract? Their treatment was a bit ham-handed: a game on Saturday, playoff coverage (when it didn’t interfere with the regular lineup), and that horrible Foxtrax puck that they could run a little comet behind.
The unnamed they have several reasons that television coverage doesn’t work in America, namely that [1] the players are too covered to be recognizable (er — no more so than football, I’d think), [2] the game is too hard to understand (if a lunkhead like me gets the basics … but try to explain icing to the average American — I think here the base of folks with actual playing experience does hurt quite a bit), and [3] that dern puck is so small and therefore hard to watch/follow (and yet people actually watch GOLF).
It’s got crashes and (emotional) explosions — like NASCAR. There’s strategy to the games. Penalties are … well, amazing equalizers, unlike free throws. Having a sudden-death overtime (and multiple OTs during the playoffs) — you can’t tell me that’s not far more dramatic than football’s OT coin-toss, or baseball’s home-team-bats-last advantage.
I dunno. Maybe it’s part of Chelios’s deal with the devil. “So you want to play until you’re eligible for Social Security? Well, all right … BUT NO ONE WILL EVER WATCH YOUR GAMES ON TELEVISION!”
Oh yeah, I remember the Fox thing. I have a good friend, an otherwise bona fide sports fan, who told me she could never warm up to hockey because she couldn’t follow the puck – what? black puck on white ice? what’s the problem here? – but that she had started to watch because she liked the Foxtrax comet.
I told her that if she wanted to be taken seriously as a hockey fan, she should never – ever – mention that again.
Seriously, though, I always wondered how she could watch (and presumably follow) baseball (small white ball moving in three dimensions at 100 mph against a multicoloured background) but couldn’get the hang of hockey (black puck on white ice moving largely in two dimensions). What gives?
The only reason I know your comments about Chelios are wrong is because CHELIOS IS THE DEVIL.