June 7, 200620 yr They reported on ESPN that the NCAA softball finals had a better T.V. rating than the NHL Playoffs.... Am not a hockey fan but this has to be embaressing to the league and its fans.... how do u hockey fans feel about this....
June 7, 200620 yr I don't give a crap....people are missing a tremendous sport and if people are too ignorant enough not to watch it, good riddance.
June 7, 200620 yr They got some 600,000-800,000 viewers. I can't remember which it was. Somewhere around there though which is pretty bad, but then again it's OLN. It actually was a pretty exciting game. Hockey will make a comeback. Attendance is pretty good, local tv ratings are solid I believe, the National ratings will come around eventually. Probably once they move back to ESPN in a few years. OLN was just a bad move for them.
June 7, 200620 yr They reported on ESPN that the NCAA softball finals had a better T.V. rating than the NHL Playoffs.... Am not a hockey fan but this has to be embaressing to the league and its fans.... how do u hockey fans feel about this.... What an incredibly misleading statistic. They're not counting the MILLIONS of Canadians who are watching the Stanley Cup Finals. If you factor that in, the NHL destroyed anything ESPN showed in the same time slot. Also, the first two games of the finals are on OLN, a channel which most people don't even receive and many others don't even know it exists or where to find it. Beginning with game 3 all of the games will be during primetime on NBC so viewership and ratings will definitely go up. The fact of the matter is that the casual fan or the channel surfer will never tune in to an NHL hockey game on a channel like OLN, but if it's on national TV like ESPN or NBC during primetime that's certainly a different case. Consistently throughout the year, all of the NHL games on NBC had quadruple the ratings of the OLN games on even the worst days. The thread title is f***ing absurd, couldn't be any farther from the truth, and should be edited.
June 7, 200620 yr The only ones who worry about NHL National TV Ratings are the Queens over at ESPN. They paid gobs of cash and didn't do anything to make it nice for NHL fans to watch ESPN. Games were relegated to ESPN2 and NHL2night got no fixed timeslot. FSN Florida and other regional sports networks pull similar numbers for the NHL as they do for the NBA...or in some cases MLB with their excellent coverage. Panthers fans watch FSN Florida.....NHL fans don't watch ESPN. OLN has done an excellent job and by this time next year should be on more TVs as it negotiates more carriage agreements. Comcast and DirecTV include OLN to all of their subscribers and Dish Network is carrying it again on the AT180. Most other providers carry it on Digital Cable. The NHL doesn't need to worry about TV money because they sell most arenas out and their local TV revenues are excellent compared to the NBA. NHL teams also have fans with long-term tickets bought.
June 7, 200620 yr Yeah, ESPN is bitter because they figured out the NHL was worth a damn this year. TV Ratings do not matter because the OLN is a channel only premium cable subscribers could get originally, now its on Comcast's basic cable. It wasn't on DirectTV till the playoffs. Adelphia doesn't have it along with a bunch of other major cable carriers. But thats ok. All of you who think the NHL is not on the face of the earth anymore, well that means I won't have competition come Panther's playoff time. Heh.
June 7, 200620 yr The OLN/Comcast deal also allows Comcast.net to stream live NHL games, Comcast to import TSN's NHL Network to the US, and Comcast also gets to air more NHL games on its Comcast SportsNet regional sports networks.
June 8, 200620 yr First of all they just had an entire season cancelled, might take a while to recover from that. Otherwise they instituted some pretty nice new rules for a change, & they actually worked. Both teams in the finals are small-market, that doesn't help either. But I think they'll be fine. It's never needed to have the popularity of MLB/NBA/NFL anyway, and now with the new agreement the league should be in much better shape.
June 8, 200620 yr I like hockey, a lot actually but I found my interest in it waining this year. Their national schedule is odd, on an inaccessable channel (and I got OLN too, it's just so high up it's not an easy scroll to) and really the only players in the league that I feel are worth the price of admission just on their own (Ovechkin, Kovalchuk) play on God awful teams and don't get a ton of national attention. The NHL is shooting itself in the foot, but it's a good to great sport and it's more of a shame that people are missing out because of poor scheduling/marketing than anything else. Really, this is more indicative of the ineptitude of the NHL than the lack of quality. But really, to me, these playoffs have just been 'meh.'
June 8, 200620 yr gotta give comcast props for completely upchucking my entire channel lineup while cleverly slipping OLN into #37 in time for the stanley cup finals.
June 8, 200620 yr i love watching hockey but the fact that i don't get oln means i've watched less than 10 games this entire year and have yet to see a cup final game and the majority of the playoff games since my internet sucks and i couldn't watch productively online with comcast's broadscast coverage. i really wanted to watch the first two games but since i didn't get them i drank instead. and i know for a fact that i'm not alone in saying that if the games were broadcast on a channel that most cable networks actually recieved the ratings would be better. i was talking to a friend on monday who is from canada and she was real upset about the whole situation with not being able to watch the games since it was on an obscure channel that some cable companies don't carry. basically the nhl is stupid for switching to oln because regardless of the additional revenue they've received from them because of the amount of casual fans they've aleinated in the process. and that's the "expert" opinion from someone who used to be a diehard nhl guy but has become totally disenfranchised with the league over the last five years even if this past year has apparently been much improved.
June 9, 200620 yr I'm not a big fan of watching hockey on TV, but I love being at the games. Of course, if the Panthers had made the playoffs, I would have been watching.
June 9, 200620 yr They reported on ESPN that the NCAA softball finals had a better T.V. rating than the NHL Playoffs.... Am not a hockey fan but this has to be embaressing to the league and its fans.... how do u hockey fans feel about this.... I would have watched more of the playoffs, but I didn't know I even HAD OLN until like 2 days ago... It's like channel 137 or something on my TV. That's not a good way to get ratings...
June 9, 200620 yr So wait, did the NHL actually pick OLN over ESPN or was it ESPN's decision not to renew? OLN doesn't do a terrible job really, it's just so new, not everyone even knows it's out there yet.
June 9, 200620 yr So wait, did the NHL actually pick OLN over ESPN or was it ESPN's decision not to renew? OLN doesn't do a terrible job really, it's just so new, not everyone even knows it's out there yet. ESPN turned them down.
June 9, 200620 yr As Hotcorner pointed it, I think it has a lot to do with the teams in the Finals being teams not many people care about.
June 9, 200620 yr As Hotcorner pointed it, I think it has a lot to do with the teams in the Finals being teams not many people care about. no, its just the fact that its on ESPN... i've found myself watching quite a few softball games, and really, i couldnt give less of a sh*t about softball.
June 9, 200620 yr As Hotcorner pointed it, I think it has a lot to do with the teams in the Finals being teams not many people care about. no, its just the fact that its on ESPN... i've found myself watching quite a few softball games, and really, i couldnt give less of a sh*t about softball. And it really doesn't hurt that there are some real cuties playing softball. :thumbup
June 9, 200620 yr As Hotcorner pointed it, I think it has a lot to do with the teams in the Finals being teams not many people care about. no, its just the fact that its on ESPN... i've found myself watching quite a few softball games, and really, i couldnt give less of a sh*t about softball. And it really doesn't hurt that there are some real cuties playing softball. :thumbup Arizona>all But ya it does hurt that it's not on a recognizable channel and the fact that one team is Canadien and the other is from Raliegh. Hockey is on its way back. It will take time
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