Quote:
Originally Posted by dontdrink36
@Aero what situations does the NHL move the needle?
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Look, I'm a diehard hockey fan. It's my favorite sport and even I'll be the first to admit that the NHL isn't perfect. They take a lot of their "wins" (like the Winter Classic) and beat them into the ground. They can't seem to get through labor negotiations without a lockout.
But popularity? Who cares. Frankly, I'm with Bill Burr on the situation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u34Gwxilycs
But it's not about "moving the needle" and it's not about hockey. It's about diversifying your customer base. ESPN has gone all-in on the NBA and the NFL. Anything outside that and you're getting the scraps, even MLB.
ESPN has done the same thing with NASCAR and soccer when they didn't get the rights to broadcast them. NASCAR fell off the face of the earth on ESPN when they didn't get those rights. For a while there it was on all the time. Like I said, it's a chicken or the egg thing, because are NASCARs ratings down because ESPN won't cover them anymore or is ESPN not covering them anymore because their numbers are down? Who knows? I certainly don't have all that information, and we can talk each other in circles until the end of time.
The point is - viewers have been leaving in droves, and it's for more than one reason. None of this happens in a vacuum. While hockey fans, or soccer fans, or NASCAR fans, etc. may not be as large of a group as NBA or NFL fans as a while, in aggregate they've alienated so many sports fans by focusing so hard on their "money makers" that there are multiple large chunks of people that don't even bother with ESPN anymore.
You have to appeal to as many groups as possible, and ESPN kicked a lot of people to the curb. You link that together with how more and more people are streaming/cutting the chord every day, as well as more and more people going to the internet for their information (and ESPN still for some reason insists on having 70% of their worthwhile content behind a paywall) and the end result is this. There are larger populations of people that just don't need to keep cable for ESPN anymore because ESPN doesn't talk about what they care about.
So, in my opinion, it's short-sighted to look at just hockey, or just soccer, and say "well people don't care about soccer" when ESPN is supposed to be a sports network. Not an NBA/NFL/TMZ network. It doesn't have to be an even split, but the numbers are just so insanely disproportionate that people don't trust ESPN as their source of sports news for so many popular sports. Is hockey as popular as the NBA? No. But it's popular enough that ESPN should care more about it, if for no other reason than to appease that fanbase to keep them interested in their network. Same for soccer. And NASCAR. etc.
I just think it's bad business. And in my opinion, that's how we got here.