Home : Ice Hockey :

National TV Coverage

Gordie Howe

The history of sports on U.S. television is the history of sports on network television. Indeed, that history is closely related to the development and success of the major television networks. With only 190,000 sets in use in 1948, the attraction of sports to the networks in its early period was not advertising dollars. Instead, broadcasters were looking toward the future of the medium, and aired sports as a means of boosting demand for television as a medium. They believed their strategy would eventually pay off in advertising revenues. But because NBC, CBS and DuMont manufactured and sold receiver sets, their more immediate goal was to sell more of them. Sports did indeed draw viewers, and although the stunning acceptance and diffusion of television cannot be attributed solely to sports, the number of sets in use in the U.S. reached ten and a half million by 1950.

Technical and economic factors made sports attractive to the fledging medium. Early television cameras were heavy and cumbersome and needed bright light to produce even a passable picture. Boxing and wrestling, contested in confined, very well-lit arenas and baseball and football, well-lit by the sun and played out in a familiar, well-defined spaces, were perfect subjects for the lens. Equally important, because sporting events already existed there were no sets to build, no writers and actors to hire. This made sports inexpensive to produce, a primary concern when the audience was small and not yet generating large advertising revenues.

The first televised sporting event was a college baseball game between Columbia and Princeton in 1939, covered by one camera providing a point of view along the third base line. But the first network sports broadcast was NBC's Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, which premiered in 1944 with the Willie Pep vs. Chalky White Featherweight Championship bout. Sports soon became a fixture on prime-time network programming, often accounting for one third of the networks' total evening fare. But in the 1950s, as television's other genres matured and developed their own large and loyal (and approximately 50% female) followings, sports began to disappear from network prime-time, settling into a very profitable and successful niche on weekends. This, too, would change, like so much else in television, with alterations in the technology and economics of the medium.

Viewers identify with their team, their favorite players, those warriors who carry the good name of their city, college, conference, nation, ethnic heritage, or other characteristic, into battle. Sports offer real heroes and villains, as opposed to the fictional characters of televised drama and comedy. Fans become familiar with those real individuals and their teams, following them, learning about them, living and dying with them, or, in the immortal words of ABC Wide World of Sports, experiencing with them the joy of victory and the agony of defeat.

Sports on television is live television, it is history in the making, it is being "up close and personal" (again, thanks to ABC) as possibly momentous events unfold. To thrill in the victory of a favorite, to join the excitment of the moment in an exhilarating game or to learn more about the teams, players or games on television are among possible satisfactions that are obviously specific to sports on television.

Hockey Night In Canada

Hockey Night In Canada has been a national institution since 1952, when Foster Hewitt's familiar "Hello, Canada!" ushered hockey fans into the era of television. It was the greeting he had been using on the radio broadcast of the same name since its first coast-to-coast coverage of a 1933 contest between the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs, coming two years after the radio broadcast of the opening game at the new Maple Leaf Gardens on Carlton Street in downtown Toronto.

The initial Hockey Night In Canada TV broadcast came several months after Hewitt called the play-by-play for the first-ever televised game in Canada, a Memorial Cup contest held at the Gardens in the spring of 1952 that was watched on close-circuit TV by a group of hockey and broadcasting officials. For Hewitt, the game was an opportunity to prove his contention that he could employ the same style of play-by-play for television that he had used on radio. He was right.

Although the early TV experiments were centered around Maple Leaf Gardens, the first NHL game to be televised on CBC was actually a game in Montreal on Oct. 11, 1952, three weeks before Toronto's debut on Nov. 1. Imperial Oil purchased the TV rights for that first season at just $100 per Maple Leafs game, as team owner Conn Smythe wanted to make sure that hockey was as appealing on TV as it was on radio before asking for an appropriate fee. The following season, Imperial purchased the rights to the games for $150,000 a year in a three-year contract. By the early 1960s, after Stafford Smythe had bought out his father's controlling stock in the Gardens, the rights sold for $9 million over six years, or about $21,000 per game.

Among Hewitt's successors as host of Hockey Night In Canada were Ward Cornell, Dave Hodge and Ron MacLean. Hewitt's son, Bill Hewitt, would eventually become a long-time play-by-play man, as did Hockey Hall of Famer Danny Gallivan, who teamed with commentator Dick Irvin in Montreal Canadiens broadcasts for many years. Bob Cole eventually replaced Bill Hewitt, who left due to declining health.

Over the years, Hockey Night In Canada also began to use former NHL players and coaches as game analysts, including Bob Goldham, Howie Meeker, Gary Dornhoefer, John Davidson, Greg Millen, John Garrett and the outspoken Don Cherry, whose "Coach's Corner" intermission segment with Ron MacLean became the highest-rated spot on Canadian television.

ESPN - National Hockey Night

The flagship sports television network since its September 7, 1979 launch, ESPN now reaches more than 80 million homes. This represents more than 78 percent of American homes with television. In September 1995, ESPN became the first cable network to achieve 70 percent penetration. ESPN is headquartered in Bristol, Conn., which is 100 miles northeast of New York City, and 100 miles southwest of Boston. ESPN televises more than 5,100 live and/or original hours of sports programming annually - more than 65 sports.

The NHL has traditionally been the Rodney Dangerfield of pro sports: no respect. While Major League Baseball, the NBA and NFL got the media attention, opinion-makers looked down their noses at hockey for its Slapshotstyle brawling and Canadian origins. While the Big Three got the billion-dollar TV contracts, the sad sack NHL went without a network TV deal in the USA from 1975 to 1995.

A decade ago the league could not beg a national network to air its crown jewel: the Stanley Cup playoffs. The playoffs were watched by 60 million viewers in the USA thanks to a five-year deal with ABC and ESPN signed in 1998. Bill Clement, the former NHL All-Star, who played for 11 years in the NHL with Philadelphia, Washington and Calgary, is the game analyst for ESPN's National Hockey Night telecasts.

Not So Good For Television

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?

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 sports­media 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.”

Ryan Collins is a freelance sportswriter based in Dallas. Calling all Fans. American Way. November 15, 2006.

The Best of Hockey Night in Canada Hockey Night in Canada has been a national institution since it premiered on CBC radio in 1931. Foster Hewitt's familiar Hello, Canada! ushered hockey fan into the era of television in 1952. This book captures the great rivalries, the stars, and classic commentary moments from the days of radio.

---

top of page

back a page