baseball's falling popularity and its affect on our hobby

[Tabe]

Originally Posted by steve B

Hockey can no longer figure out just what teams are in the NHL, and when the season is. To think they were doing so well a few years ago and blew it all with two work stoppages over -- I'm not sure just what. Went from primetime network coverage to OLN or maybe ESPN2 overnight.

Hockey is bigger, more popular, and drawing better ratings than it has in a long, long time. Certainly a lot more than before the last stoppage. It has never had primetime network coverage - at least in the last 30 years - outside of Canada. When it was on ESPN and ESPN2, that cable network intentionally tried to bury the league by constantly shuffling games around, pre-empting them, burying coverage in SportsCenter, or reducing coverage to simply highlights of fighting. They did this to appeal to the NBA and NFL and tank the value of the NHL TV contract. It worked. The NHL walked away and wandered off to OLN and was lost in the woods for a bit. Now the NHL has regular national coverage on NBCSN - which gets generally the same amount of households as ESPN - and has a massive ratings/attendance hit in its annual Winter Classic game. Attendance is the highest, %-wise, of any of the four major leagues. Revenues are up. The most recent TV contract is worth $2 billion.

In other words, hockey is doing just fine and is actually growing. The narrative from 2004 isn't true anymore.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Tabe

Hockey is bigger, more popular, and drawing better ratings than it has in a long, long time. Certainly a lot more than before the last stoppage. It has never had primetime network coverage - at least in the last 30 years - outside of Canada. When it was on ESPN and ESPN2, that cable network intentionally tried to bury the league by constantly shuffling games around, pre-empting them, burying coverage in SportsCenter, or reducing coverage to simply highlights of fighting. They did this to appeal to the NBA and NFL and tank the value of the NHL TV contract. It worked. The NHL walked away and wandered off to OLN and was lost in the woods for a bit. Now the NHL has regular national coverage on NBCSN - which gets generally the same amount of households as ESPN - and has a massive ratings/attendance hit in its annual Winter Classic game. Attendance is the highest, %-wise, of any of the four major leagues. Revenues are up. The most recent TV contract is worth $2 billion.

In other words, hockey is doing just fine and is actually growing. The narrative from 2004 isn't true anymore.

Interesting. You can tell I haven't followed it all that closely for some time.

I wonder if I'm confusing the once great local coverage for national coverage. The Bruins were on TV a lot before the first stoppage, hardly at all after. Even NESN backed off a lot.
ESPN shuffling them around must have really hurt, that's almost a guarantee of poor ratings for any show. (The local outlet did that to Babylon 5) The league being on OLN was a big surprise, since OLN at the time was sort of like ESPN when it began, showing pretty much any sporting event they could.

Hopefully they'll continue building back up. I think there's probably a lot of international interest which probably helps (I could be wrong)

Steve B