NHL’s U.S. Playoff TV Ratings Down 27% in Early Games

TV ratings in the NHL’s regular season were down 12% compared to the 2023–2024 season. Early returns from the Stanley Cup playoffs are not providing optimism about reversing that trend.

Through Monday’s games, postseason broadcasts were averaging 718,000 viewers, which is down 27% from last year.

With a stronger presence of Canadian teams in the playoffs, it was expected that U.S. viewership might struggle. 

In Canada, though, the TV ratings appear to be doing better. Game 1 of the Canadiens-Capitals series averaged 1.68 million viewers on the French-language TVA Sports. When looking at Canada’s French-speaking population of around 11 million, that would be considered close to NFL conference championship-level reach in the U.S.

Report Card

In the fourth season of the NHL’s seven-year, $4.5 billion U.S. media-rights deals with Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, games across ABC, ESPN, TNT, and truTV averaged 445,000 viewers per broadcast, a noticeable dip from the average of 504,000 per game last season. ESPN+ and Hulu also had some exclusive national streams, but viewership figures for those games don’t get released to the public.

It’s the first time under the current media-rights deals that season-long viewership has declined, and also the lowest combined average figures on ESPN and TNT Sports platforms. However, the 445,000 average game number is still above the 391,000 NBC Sports drew in the COVID-19-impacted 2020–2021 season, the broadcaster’s final one with NHL rights.

While the regular-season numbers are down, there is a big caveat when grading the NHL’s TV ratings this year. The debut of the 4 Nations Face-Off was an enormous hit across multiple metrics, including TV. ESPN averaged 9.3 million viewers for the U.S.-Canada final of the seven-game tournament, which is the most-watched NHL game ever in the U.S.