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Despite a particularly crowded sports calendar and some grumbling within hockey, the National Hockey League’s Frozen Frenzy this week posted strong viewership increases.
ESPN said it logged a 20% viewership bump compared to last year for its tripleheader coverage of the NHL Frozen Frenzy on Tuesday, which featured all 32 teams in the league playing on a single night. In particular, coverage of a Penguins-Flyers game on the network averaged 680,000 viewers, up 67% from the NHL’s season-long average on ESPN last year.
Now, in its third year, NHL Frozen Frenzy is designed to provide an additional boost to early-season play, not dissimilar to how the NBA created the Emirates NBA Cup to help elevate pre-holiday interest in that league. In addition to the three featured games on ESPN itself, the other 13 from NHL Frozen Frenzy were on ESPN+, set up with staggered starts over a five-hour period. ESPN then supplemented it with an NFL RedZone–style whiparound show.
NHL Frozen Frenzy, however, went up against Game 4 of the World Series, which generated an average of 21.5 million viewers across the U.S. and Canada. Much of the elevated audience for MLB stems from the presence of the Blue Jays in the World Series and the rabid fandom for the team across Canada, a traditional hotbed for hockey.
The NHL could not have known what the Blue Jays would do when it set the Oct. 28 date for Frozen Frenzy earlier this year. The game dates for the World Series, however, have also been established for months, and the NHL still went up against it. Multiple reports pointed to complaints from some NHL team executives about schedule disruptions in local markets created by NHL Frozen Frenzy, despite the nonstop hockey action that the night provided.
NHL Frozen Frenzy featured five of the sixteen games going to overtime and four featuring at least nine goals scored.
For the season, meanwhile, ESPN is up 40% in NHL viewership to an average of 587,000 per game.
