As you may have heard, the Boston Bruins won the NHL's Stanley Cup earlier this week. Then again, you might have only heard about some rioting in Vancouver and not have had any idea of what is was all about - after all, the NHL isn't exactly easy for people to follow these days. Despite what NHL pundits are calling an extremely extertaining playoff season and a championship series that matched two strong hockey markets against one another, it still seems like sports fans have all but stopped tracking the NHL.
It's upsetting, because ice hockey is a wonderful sport. The problem is that the NHL has consistently been damaging the game over the past decade. First there was the NHL lockout, which drove many fans away. Once the game returned, the league had an unfortunate string of Western and Southern Stanley Cup champions (Anaheim, Tampa Bay, Carolina) which did little to bring in the core hockey fans in the northeast and Great Lakes regions. This season, though, it's harder to pinpoint the NHL's excuse.
As a result of the league's horrendous national TV deal ("split" between NBC and Versus, with the majority of games on the latter channel), sports fans have to work hard to find playoff hockey. With so much competing sports content airing on ESPN and the broadcast networks, the question comes down to how much do fans really love hockey, especially when their team isn't playing? Although I love the game and love the Islanders, I found it surprisingly hard to get myself to watch Bruins-Canucks. Every time I flipped the game on, I would drift back to baseball on ESPN, the NBA Finals on ABC, and, one time, "Say Yes to the Dress" on TLC (Is he joking . . .?).
Highlights were even hard to come by while watching SportsCenter. At various points earlier in the series, the Stanley Cup Finals was buried below the NBA Finals, regular season MLB action, the French Open, NFL and NBA lockout updates and more. After the series ended with a Boston victory, the riots in Vancouver got more air time than the game highlights. If the NHL wants to compete for viewers with the NBA, let alone MLB and the NFL, it needs to focus their strategy on making hockey content more available to the typical lazy sports fan. Whether it's a more agressive online media strategy or a renegotiated TV deal with the newly-united NBC and Comcast, the NHL must stop forcing its fans to work as hard to watch its games as the players do on the ice.
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