Canadian fans may not love the Stanley Cup matchup — but it’s good for the game

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When you think of your dream hockey matchup, you probably aren’t thinking of Florida, Dallas or Las Vegas. Certainly not what many Canadian fans expected from the Stanley Cup final. No doubt the broadcaster did not expect this.

Still, let’s be honest, maybe that’s what the National Hockey League has been aiming for.

“The NHL is probably secretly delighted,” said Adam Seaborn, a sports media analyst and head of partnerships at a firm called Playmaker Capital.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has spent most of his tenure building games in the South, he says.

“He finally made it to the final of the Southern Cup,” Seaborn said in an interview. “This is the completion of Gary’s 25-year vision of bringing hockey to the American South.”

This year’s NHL playoffs kicked off with high expectations from Canadian fans.

The prospect of the first all-Canadian final since 1989 was very real, even if only temporarily. The Edmonton Oilers look poised to break through the crowded field in the West, and the Toronto Maple Leafs have made it past the first round for the first time in 19 years.

The audience was enthusiastic, to say the least.

Toronto’s Game 6 victory over the Tampa Bay Lightning drew a crowd of 4.4 million. In Edmonton’s Round 1 series, average viewership (estimated average number of people watched/viewed in an average minute) increased by 14% from his 2002 season.

Then disaster struck. Both Canadian teams were eliminated.

The Florida Panthers are now in the finals. The Dallas Stars and Vegas Golden Knights are battling for the Western Conference title.

None of them can be said to be a great success in the so-called audience rating.

“These Sun Belt four teams aren’t the most watched teams on TV,” said John Lewis, who runs the American sports business website Sports Media Watch.

If the NHL was just chasing ratings, he said, it would want to face powerhouses like the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers.

But ratings aren’t the only thing the NHL is chasing here.

Certainly, existing fans would have gone wild to see the Oilers in the Finals. Or any of the big teams. But how many more new fans can the NHL squeeze out of saturated markets like Toronto and Boston?

Bettmann has bet for years that the game can grow in non-traditional markets.

As franchises like Florida and Las Vegas make their way to the highest levels of the game, new fans are born and new traditions are built.

“In the city where it’s happening, it’s 100 percent a home run,” said former NHL player and popular podcast host spittin chicletsRyan Whitney.

At the same time, Whitney says the expansion into the American South has not been without failures.

Arizona’s NHL franchise is on the brink of collapse. Playing in a small local college rink with fewer spectators than most Canadian AHL teams, the city rejected a proposal to build a new arena.

However, there is a lot of speculation as to where the Coyotes will move, even as the team is on the brink of failure.

“clearly [Arizona’s] It is not working. Any time you move out of a completely dead market and into a place where you can build a new fan base, there’s an opportunity,” Lewis said.

There is renewed enthusiasm to bring the team back to Quebec City. There are also speculations that the NHL may move the team to Houston, the fourth largest city in the United States.

”[Expansions to] Seattle and Vegas are big success stories for the league,” Lewis said.

That led to the growth of hockey in those communities. And that results in more excitement for the game, more kids taking up hockey, and more money being spent.

In NHL jargon, these new revenues are called hockey-related revenues.

At a board meeting in December, Bettmann announced he expected league revenue this year to be about $5.7 billion.

As the NHL is still trying to overcome the losses caused by the pandemic, he expected players to still owe owners about $150 million after this season.

“We’ll just wait and see,” Bettmann said in December. “Obviously, if we don’t finish the escrow payments this year, we’ll be all gone after next year, and there shouldn’t be any problems with that.”

But the debt is now almost paid off.

New broadcasting deals in the US are certainly helping. In 2021, ESPN agreed to pay $400 million a year for air hockey games. Warner’s separate deal with Turner Sports will bring in an additional $250 million in annual revenue.

These deals are more than double what US broadcasters paid for previous deals, Seaborn said.

“This is hockey-related revenue that goes into everyone’s pocket. [salary] cap,” he said.

As the salary cap rises, teams can spend more money on star players or acquire more players to improve their lineups.

So while Canadian fans may not be particularly enthusiastic about the possibility of a Sunbelt Stanley Cup, in order to bring in more fans and grow the game, teams here are pushing higher salary caps. may have exactly what you need.

So they can spend more money and eventually make it higher in the playoffs.

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