Calling all Fans
THE NHL'S RETURN TO THE ICE BROUGHT FANS BACK TO THE ARENAS IN RECORD NUMBERS LAST SEASON, BUT TV RATINGS CONTINUED TO STAGGER.
THE QUESTION NOW IS, CAN THEY TURN THIS AROUND? BY RYAN COLLINS, ILLUSTRATION BY TIM BOWER.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is walking down a Manhattan street during his lunch break on a Monday afternoon in August when a stranger approaches him. “You’re the commissioner, aren’t you?” the man asks. “You know, during the lockout I was upset, but what you guys did last season, I want you to know I appreciate it.” The man shakes the commissioner’s hand and walks away.
For Bettman, the encounter is a subtle reminder that, despite all the trials and tribulations of the past few years, including the longest lockout in professional sports history, the NHL is back from its darkest hour. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way — at least not according to the experts who left the NHL for dead following the cancellation of the 2004–2005 season. Taking an entire year off from production is business suicide. But with rule changes generating more scoring and a salary cap creating more parity within the league, the NHL is more popular than ever, setting record numbers in attendance last season and blowing its projected revenue out of the water.
“One of the ‘luxuries,’ and I use that term in quotes, that occurred from a hockey operation standpoint during the work stoppage was the ability to focus on the game and what essential elements we could fix,” Bettman says. “We knew that, over time, we’d alienate our fans if we didn’t.”
The question now, though, is, can the NHL — one season removed from its remarkable return to the ice — make a splash on the national television scene, where the real financial rewards are?
FOR YEARS, IT HAS BEEN the same anemic story for a league struggling to find an identity in the national TV market. The loyal local television fan base in a city such as St. Louis or Detroit fails to reach a city with no NHL ties — like Tulsa, where hockey is about as popular as bowling or drag racing. Meanwhile, the NFL, NBA, and MLB thrive with their lucrative national television contracts and are universally popular throughout the nation, regardless of the market. The NFL, considered the gold standard of the professional sports television industry, generates nearly twice as much in television revenue as the NHL does in total revenue.
Shawn Bradley, chief operating officer of the sports marketing firm the Bonham Group, believes part of the problem is that hockey isn’t nearly as captivating on the small screen as it is in person. Bradley says the speed of the game entices a live audience but that on television, the game is actually less appealing than the other three sports. With pucks traveling at speeds of up to 100 mph and bouncing all over the rink, the game is difficult to follow within the confines of a living room.
“What can you do about that?” Bradley asks. “You’re talking about something that’s good for attendance and not so good for television. It’s not something that can be changed.”
Another part of the problem, according to Neal Pilson, president of the sports marketing firm Pilson Communications, is that hockey fans have little experience playing the sport compared with fans of the other three sports.
“One thing hockey deals with is that a lot of its fans have never played the game, so many of them aren’t as knowledgeable [about] the game as, say, a basketball fan,” he explains.
Pilson’s comment is not a knock on hockey’s fan base. The reality is that it’s much cheaper to join the local YMCA basketball league than it is to join an organized hockey team. And it’s much more convenient to shoot hoops or to throw a football around at the neighborhood park than it is to head to the nearest hockey rink and strap on the skates to practice a slap shot.
But the cause for alarm isn’t so much that the NHL is the runt of the “Big Four” in national television appeal — the real cause for concern is that over the past few years the league has been losing its already minuscule national television audience. And last season was no different. In one of the most intriguing postseasons ever, the Edmonton Oilers became the first number-eight seed to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals; they came within one game of winning it all. Yet, NBC and Versus (formerly OLN) posted an abysmal average rating of 1.8 for the seven-game series. Game 2 of the Stanley Cup on Versus earned lower ratings than a rained-out baseball game on ESPN, and NBC’s ratings for Game 7 were 21 percent lower than ABC’s ratings for Game 7 in 2004.
“There’s nothing that can seriously influence the ratings right now,” Pilson says. “They might go up or down, depending on who’s playing. If you have teams like Detroit, Chicago, or New York in the Stanley Cup, then, yes, you’ll see the ratings go up some, but nothing that will stand out too much.”
“I’ve heard people say that parity backfired, because a big-market team didn’t make it to the finals,” Versus president Gavin Harvey counters. “But the way I see it, we couldn’t have asked for a better Stanley Cup, because it was the two best teams playing a competitive series that went seven games.”
REPLACING ABC AND ESPN with NBC and Versus last season was another aspect of Bettman’s makeover of the NHL; unfortunately, the new television contract is not producing the same overnight success as the rule changes and the salary cap did. Versus has considerably lower subscription numbers than ESPN — and it’s a small network looking to make its mark in the sports media industry.
“A big part of [the problem] was the relocation to a new station with a much smaller viewership than ESPN’s,” Bradley says. “The challenge [now] for the league is getting people to know that Versus is the home of the NHL. To do that, the NHL has to focus on creating a core audience at the gate. Then, out of that core, a television audience will eventually grow.”
And, unlike in the NHL’s prior contract with ABC, the league does not receive guaranteed money from its partnership with NBC. Instead, the NHL and NBC split advertising revenue. The lack of a rights fee is an agreement fit for the Arena Football League — not for one of the largest professional leagues in the country.
Bettman, though, thinks the league made the right decision. “We knew we were giving up in the short term some distribution [in exchange] for better coverage,” Bettman explains. “It’s something you can’t judge in one or even two seasons, but I believe we’re going to see growth over the next few years.”
Therein lies the fundamental objective of the NHL’s quest for notoriety in national television. The league is taking a temporary step back to take two steps forward.
And there is reason to believe that the current ratings are not representative of the future state of the NHL on national television. Fan approval of the NHL is at an all-time high, attendance is up 2.4 percent from the season prior to the lockout, and the league garnered $300 million more last season than it projected it would earn.
Meanwhile, Versus is emerging as a significant entity in the sports broadcast industry. In its first year broadcasting the NHL, the cable network increased by more than five million subscribers, and its time periods jumped by double and triple digits in the ratings, thanks to its hockey coverage.
“When we got the NHL, it was a complete game-changer for our business,” Harvey says. “Ask anyone — they’d kill to have the numbers we had in our first season.”
When the network inked its deal with the league last year, it only had six weeks to integrate an existing NHL schedule into its broadcast lineup. Everything from assembling a broadcast team to developing a marketing campaign was done in shotgun fashion.
“Nobody knew what was going to happen,” Harvey says. “Imagine what you’ve got to get done to present a couple of games on a major sport in a short amount of time. What we accomplished gives me a lot of hope for season two.”
Now, Versus has had the proper amount of preparation time to devote itself to six hours of coverage per NHL telecast, which includes shoulder programming, doubleheaders, and wrap-up shows. Never before has the NHL been covered so extensively, and it’s that type of attention that Bettman believes will eventually boost the ratings.
“Versus is committed to a growing game, and we are more important to Versus than we were to any other of our prior partners,” he says. “Instead of being one among many, like most sports are on other networks, Versus gives us an opportunity to shine.”
This season, Versus is airing 54 games, including 24 that are on when no other game is scheduled, giving the league a true game-of-the-week, akin to ESPN’s Monday Night Football.
“The sports broadcasting world is constantly changing, and there is always hope in sight,” Bradley says. “Who thought 20 years ago that the NFL would be on ESPN, or that TNT would have the NBA?”
And NBC is doing its part to give the NHL every opportunity to succeed. NBC, which earned a profit from last season’s NHL coverage, is rewarding the league with an expansion of its broadcast schedule from six weekend dates to nine. The additional games provide the NHL with the most regular-season broadcast coverage it’s had in the United States since 1998.
“The added coverage is indicative of our commitment to hockey,” NBC Sports’ Brian Walker says. “They introduced a stellar crop of young stars, and I know they are working hard to expose them.”
And with top young stars like Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals’ Alexander Ovechkin, hockey has the profile players it needs to appeal to the casual television viewer the way NBC did back in the Michael Jordan–Magic Johnson–Larry Bird era of the NBA.
“For a while, hockey lacked the players with universal appeal that you can build a fan base around — the type of player that basketball has in Dwyane Wade or Shaq,” Pilson says. “The NHL has to market those players so they become household names.”
WITH THE NEW RULE CHANGES and the anxiety involved in bringing the game back after a yearlong leave of absence behind it, the league now must focus its attention on fixing its ratings problem and developing a national television fan base. The NHL’s dedication to boosting attendance is the best shot at doing this. But for now, as Bettman will attest, it’s a work in progress.
“This past season was about relaunching and getting our fans back, and now we have the right foundation to move forward on,” he says. “The fans continue to come back, and the ratings will grow.”