As each coming year passes, the ratings for the NHL are getting lower and lower, and something needs to be done in order to stop this trend.
During last year’s Stanley Cup Final, the number of people who watched the action were heavily outnumbered by those tuning into the NBA Finals and even late-night slam dunk competition shows.
Now it shouldn’t be alarming that more people decided to watch the NBA Finals over the Stanley Cup Finals, but what is concerning is that the NHL is starting to lose some of its most loyal viewers to the product that the NBA offers. The NBA has always had a larger fan base than that of the NHL, but now you are seeing people like me, lifelong, diehard hockey fans, deciding to turn on basketball in favor of hockey. From a personal standpoint, I have been choosing basketball because it provides me with a more exciting product than the NHL offers.
In recent years, scoring in the NHL has gone down for a variety of different reasons. Whether it is too big of goalie equipment, referees not calling enough penalties or the new establishment of the offside challenge, the fact of the matter is not a lot of people, especially the more casual fan, want to keep watching 2-1 hockey games. The good news, however, is that the NHL has been granted a big opportunity to fix this.
This opportunity is the recent influx of all the young and exciting talent currently entering the NHL. Over the past couple years, the NHL has been granted generational talents like Connor McDavid, Jack Eichel, Auston Matthews and Patrik Laine, and they shouldn’t take them for granted. These are players who, at the ages of 18 and 19, are able to be top scorers. For example, Laine is currently the NHL goals leader and McDavid leads the league in assists. The last players who were able to perform at these kind of levels during their rookie year were Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby, the two centerpieces behind the NHL’s post-lockout revamping.
When the NHL was granted two all-time superstars with the likes of Crosby and Ovechkin, the league decided to completely retool and transform the rule to provide a more open, fast-paced style of game. The results were tremendous. For the first time in years, the NHL went from a league dominated by the trap and clutch and grab to a league that stressed and strived for maximum excitement and entertainment. Games became high scoring again as fans started to become accustomed to 4 to 3, 5 to 4 and even 6 to 5 final scores.
I hope the NHL sees what they have going for them in all the young, dominant talent that is just starting to enter the league. If the NHL ever wants to get back to a position where they are a true top sports entertainment league, they need to take actions similar to those of the post-lockout season, and once again transform the league into a high scoring product that more than just loyal NHL fans make time to tune into.
Ethan MacKrell is the Opinions Editor of The Bona Venture. His email is
mackreec15@bonaventure.edu
