How to Make the NHL popular: Part 1: Do anything possible to put it on ESPN

On this, the day between the regular season and post season of the NHL, Mahatma and I have decided to debate the best way to promote the NHL and return it to its previous glory as one of the big 4 sports.

Sportscenter a few weeks ago: there were upwards of 10 hockey games played, many of which involved teams who were either fighting for playoff spots or playoff position. After watching the first 40 minutes of sportscenter, I realized that they were going to show every highlight except for the hockey. And worse, this was a daily Sportscenter trend.

So what happens to the NHL without ESPN? If it doesn’t die a slow death, then it certainly crawls on minus a limb or two. You can catch the NHL on Vs. twice a week and NBC once a week post-NFL. In Vs’ defense, they have some pretty solid people covering the games, but only core hockey fans know that Vs. exists. Hockey will maintain something of an audience, if only because its core audience is like no other fanbase except possibly soccer, but how can it expand its viewership when the average sports fan doesn’t even know that Vs. exists? And until there is a national show that the common sports fan can easily find to watch hockey highlights, hockey will not expand beyond its core audience.

And it’s a shame too, because the average sports fan likes hockey. Most casual fans and even most non-sports fans leave a hockey game feeling entertained. (Though with ticket prices what they are today for anything except for the top few rows, saying that fans got their moneys worth now has a whole new meaning. But that’s another article.) But Americans are lazy; they’ll watch whatever sport is put in front of them. If they have to make the extra effort to find hockey, they won’t bother. So if they like the NBA and NHL equally, they’ll just watch the NBA because they don’t have to do research in order to find it.

Even diehard hockey fans have a hard time being able to follow anything but the local team. As a Devil fan living in Capitals territory, I’ve had no choice but to become a casual Caps fan over the last few years. But I’m still a Devils fan at heart and will do anything to follow them, and that leaves me with two options: 1. buy the NHL package for about $160, and frankly, it’s unfair to ask most people (myself included) to throw down for that, or 2. go to www.nj.com/devils every day and read the local coverage from the Star-Ledger, and catch a little of the games for the few weeks each year that I’m in NJ. And even with all that, I’m still not able to follow the team as much as I want.

More likely than not, the average hockey fan is going to do what this one dude I spoke with on the DC Metro does: he’s a fan of 3 teams because he’s lived in 3 different NHL cities. Unable to follow any of his previous two teams closely after he leaves the city, he is now a Capitals fan.

So what can be done? The answer is unfortunate, but very simple. GARY BETTMAN MUST DO WHATEVER IS IN HIS POWER TO GET HOCKEY BACK INTO THE ESPN MIX.

Look, I don’t know the economics that surround this, but there are still enough Texas Hold-Em tournaments on the ESPN networks to prove that they have room for some hockey games each week. If you put the hockey on TV, the minions will follow. And once people are given a glimpse of the new and improved NHL, they’ll return. The quality of play is too exciting for them not to, with potentially two of the top ten players of all time still 6 or 7 years away from reaching their peak performance.

I don’t like sucking from the corporate teat of ESPN any more than anyone else. Their ability to rid hockey from the national sports consciousness is an evil of Nixonian proportions. I don’t know how to get it back, but there are smarter minds than me working for the NHL and ESPN who surely can make this happen. The NHL must do this if they want to maintain a long term fanbase, even if it costs the owners some money in the short term.

The bottom line is this: if you show it, the fans will come. And ESPN is the only way to do that.