{"id":68,"date":"2008-01-12T00:55:22","date_gmt":"2008-01-12T04:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2008\/01\/12\/limbo-limbo-how-low-can-you-go\/"},"modified":"2008-01-12T00:55:22","modified_gmt":"2008-01-12T04:55:22","slug":"limbo-limbo-how-low-can-you-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2008\/01\/12\/limbo-limbo-how-low-can-you-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Limbo, limbo, how low can you go?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike<\/a> and I had a little discussion a few days ago, in the comments section of his site, about inter alia<\/i> (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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Here<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

At some point, Mike referred to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}