For The 2nd Year In A Row, Nobody Gave A Shit About The NHL's Winter Classic
Icon Sportswire. Getty Images.Awful Announcing -- The NHL’s Winter Classic continues to find itself in the viewership doldrums. For the second-consecutive year, the Winter Classic failed to crack the seven-figure audience threshold after having surpasses one million viewers every year since its debut in 2008.
Friday’s game between the New York Rangers and Florida Panthers from LoanDepot Park in Miami averaged just 978,000 viewers across TNT and truTV, up 6% versus last year’s all-time low featuring the St. Louis Blues and Chicago Blackhawks from Wrigley Field (920,000 viewers), according to data from the TV Media Blog Substack.
Well well well…would ya look at that. Turns out that nobody gives a rat's ass about an outdoor hockey game being played in South Florida on a Friday night. Who would have ever thought?
It's genuinely insane just how hard the NHL has botched the Winter Classic. There was nothing like it across all sports. The NHL had finally founded something unique and truly spectacular to add to their game. Something that no other sport could match. New Years Day. Historic venues. HBO's "The Road to the Winter Classic" all leading up to the game. Everything about it was perfect for those first few years.
But then the NHL decided to get greedy. They saw the success of the Winter Classic, and decided to drive it into the ground. Nothing has backfired on the league quite like the Stadium Series. At no point has the NHL tried to do anything to make the Winter Classic feel special anymore. In fact, they've done the complete opposite.
For the past 2 years now, the league has moved the Winter Classic off of the traditional New Years Day schedule. Obviously the broadcast moving from NBC to TNT is going to impact ratings a bit, but let's not act like it's a coincidence these have been the worst 2 years for viewership. I get that the College Football Playoffs having games on New Years Day would scare the NHL off of having one of their premier events on that day. But scared money don't make money, and clearly submitting to college football was the wrong move for the NHL.
Nobody cares enough to turn on TNT to watch an outdoor game from Miami on a January 2nd Friday night when it's 72 degrees out. You need to bank on people being tired and hungover on their couch on New Years Day to watch these games. Afternoon outdoor hockey in an environment that could actually make their own ice. Stop trying to give the the Winter Classic to cities that don't actually experience winter.
With all that being said, there's still hope. The NHL may have finally cracked a cheat code for the Winter Classic by moving the Coyotes out of the desert and up into the mountains of Utah. Because as far as backdrops go for a Winter Classic, there are very few that can top what next year's is going to look like in Salt Lake City.
Now we just have to pray the NHL does the right thing and moves the game back to New Years Day.