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Tuesday, January 4, 2011

NHL Needs to Take Advantage of Work Stoppage

2011 could be a terrible year for sports, with the NFL and NBA facing potential work stoppages. Roger Goodell is looking on the bright side, saying a new collective bargaining agreement "can and will" happen, while David Stern has been mum on the subject. However, many are not as optimistic, and the vast majority of football and basketball folks believe there will be at the very best a delay in the 2011-12 seasons.

For the NFL, the country's most popular sport that attracts the most television viewers and revenue, a strike would anger fans when the league has never been more popular. For the NBA, a strike would negate all the progress made in regaining its popularity from the MJ/Magic/Bird days, and the league would have to start again from scratch.

But one league needs to take full advantage of the potential work stoppages, because there may never again be as good an opportunity to become relevant in the American mind. The NHL needs to take drastic action.

It is pretty clear by now that hockey will never be as popular as football or baseball in America. And they can't act like they are. Other than the annual Winter Classic and to some extent the playoffs, hockey ratings are just dreadful. Even for the Winter Classic, which is advertised for months, the ratings aren't that good. This year's between the Capitals and Penguins -- featuring the league's two biggest stars since Gretzky and Lemieux on prime-time, national television -- drew 4.5 million viewers. It was the most watched regular season game since 1975. To put that in perspective, NBC's pre-game show prior to Sunday Night Football drew over 11 million viewers last week.

Bottom line, no matter what happens, the NHL will never be on the same level as the National Football League. But that doesn't mean it can't have a more significant impact in sports. Right now, can you name 10 hockey players not named Sidney Crosby or Alex Ovechkin?

Ever since the 2004-05 lockout, the league has struggled mightily. I think Gary Bettman expected Crosby and Ovechkin to have the same effect that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa did on baseball. Fans were upset over the lockout that resulted in the cancellation of the 1994 postseason. It was the fourth stoppage in 22 years, and that anger was beginning to overcome the national adoration for the game. Then Big Mac and Slammin' Sammy come in and pump life back into the sport, catapulting it back into the forefront of American sports as they chased the single-season home run record (they were 'roided up, sure, but that's another story).  Bettman probably thought Sid the Kid and Alexander the Great would have this same effect.

He was wrong.

It was not until recently, within the last two years, where people have really begun to focus back on the NHL. This past Stanley Cup Finals between the Flyers and Blackhawks averaged 6.1 million viewers, its best ratings in 13 years. That's pretty good, admittedly. It is the largest audience in the sport's history, according to NHL officials. But for the best playoffs in sports to draw less than what an average NFL game will attract, or less than half of what the MLB postseason will draw, shows how irrelevant the sport is in the United States.

It is clear that Bettman's attempt to withdraw hockey from Canada and into the southern U.S. has not worked out. This year, of the 16 lowest attendance figures, only the Bruins, Oilers, Devils and Islanders existed prior to the 1990s. The other 12 were either expansion franchises or moved from one city to another. Since 2000, attendance has clearly shown hockey in the south and west to not be attractive to fans.


Season
Teams After 1990 in Bottom Half of Attendance
Teams After 1990 in Top 10 in Attendance
2010-11
12
0
2009-10
10
1
2008-09
10
1
2007-08
8
2
2006-07
7
2
2005-06
9
2
2004-05
(lockout)
(lockout)
2003-04
9
2
2002-03
8
3
2001-02
9
3
2000-01
8
2




Teams like the Thrashers, Blue Jackets, Predators, Panthers, Coyotes and Ducks are consistently among the worst in attendance. The only exception among these teams is the Wild, who are always in the top 10. But what makes them different than the other 11 teams that were created after 1990? They are in Minnesota. Attendance was never a constant problem for the North Stars. Their owner moved the team to Dallas in 1994, and the league promised a new team would be put there. 
They are the only team that gets any sort of regularity in attendance. Compare that to Canada. The Canadians and Maple Leafs are always among the best in attendance. For the gold medal game in these past Winter Olympics (the best hockey game since the Miracle on Ice, by the way), 75 percent of the nation watched. For the Super Bowl, less than half of America tunes in. 


And Bettman thought it would be smart to move hockey out of the Great White North...


But now is the time for change. The league needs to take advantage of being potentially the only major sport playing from November 2011 to March 2012. The television deal with Versus ends at the end of this season. Priority number one should be getting a deal with ESPN. Right now Versus reaches about 74 million households. However, only a quarter million watch games on average. For a professional sports league, having national ratings of that size is pathetic. And two of the Stanley Cup Finals games are aired there! The Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Phillies get that many viewers on a given night for a regular season game, and they are regional broadcasts that reach nowhere even remotely close to 74 million households. It's embarrassing.


Right now the weekly agreement with NBC isn't working. The deal expires at the end of the season, but is expected to be renewed. That's fine. However, to broadcast nine Sundays of the regular season that lasts five and a half months is not enough. To get as much exposure as possible, the league needs to get back on ESPN. 


Think about it: the worldwide leader in sports advertising the crap out of hockey. Ratings would certainly go up substantially. Why do you think the X-Games are on ESPN? Because they wouldn't get a tenth of the exposure elsewhere. Why do you think LeBron James aired "The Decision" on ESPN? Because he's a narcissistic jerk who needed as much exposure as possible and knew where he would get the most. Being broadcast from Bristol, Connecticut means you are getting the most exposure possible.


And that is what the NHL needs to do during this potential two-sport work stoppage, no?


Hockey is physical, exciting, has the best playoffs bar none, yet no one cares. The Winter Classic is a good start to gain national attention. But now is the time for the NHL to step up and do everything it possibly can to get into the focus of American sports. There will be no better chance than 2011.

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