Concerning reports surfaces regarding the NHL losing viewership and it's affecting the New York Rangers

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Hunter Bowman
October 15, 2024 (1:34 PM)

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A very concerning report has been made regarding the NHL and its viewership seeing a sharp decline in views.

Drew Lerner who's is from the sports broadcasting blog �Awful Announcing' has recently reported that the NHL has seen a sharp decline in viewership to the start of this season, that is impacting many around the league.

According to Lerner the NHL is losing viewership rapidly and now has lower viewership than the MLB, and the WNBA.

It was reported that the NHL's opening night only averaged 559,000 views, which is 39% less then the 2023 opening night season.

Here's the report from Drew Lerner:

In an interesting programming decision, two teams situated west of the Mississippi River opened the season while it was still afternoon on the East Coast. The St. Louis Blues and Seattle Kraken opened the action during the late afternoon window, averaging 348,000 viewers, down 42% from last season's Nashville Predators-Tampa Bay Lightning game (598,000 viewers).

Game two of the tripleheader was the top hockey audience of the night, as the Boston Bruins and defending champions Florida Panthers averaged 790,000 viewers. The game was down 45 percent from last season's Chicago Blackhawks-Pittsburgh Penguins game that averaged 1.43 million viewers and included Bedard's debut.

The NHL closed out the night featuring its new franchise, the Utah Hockey Club, up against the Blackhawks. The game averaged 522,000 viewers, down 24 percent from the Seattle Kraken and Las Vegas Golden Knights nightcap last season (691,000 viewers).

As many have pointed out, all three NHL games were beaten out by Game 5 of the Minnesota Lynx-Connecticut Sun WNBA semifinal series over on ESPN2, which averaged 984,000 viewers, and continued a strong postseason for that league.

- Drew Lerner

It's completely understandable to lose viewers to the MLB, as they are a bigger sport and are currently in their playoffs right now, but having less viewers than the WNBA is a big problem for the NHL.

However, the National Hockey League has been terrible at promoting the league for years now, and think that adding news teams will fix there issues but ultimately it won't, but along with that they are forcing fans to subscribe to multiple streams to just watch their team play all 82 games which is a terrible way to keep fans interactive.

Regional restrictions is another thing the NHL needs to get rid of, it makes no sense that fans can't watch games in a local area because the broadcasting agreements. This will continue to affect every team in the NHL, including the New York Rangers.