Here in the US, the Big 4 sports generally refers to baseball, basketball, football and hockey. I, personally, make no distinctions between pro and college football for purposes of the Big 4.
Now, considering this year’s Stanley Cup Finalsare being watched by a handful more people than Cupkake Wars, should hockey still be considered in that echelon of sports in America? Those teams in the Finals, by the way, represent 2 of the biggest markets in North America (LA and NY (ok, NJ, but close enough)).
I know the Finals are on NBCSN, which is new to a lot of people, but come on. It beats Versus, right?
So, if you don’t think hockey is in America’s Big 4, then does America really just have a Big 3 or is there another sport that should replace hockey in the Big 4?
Do other countries also refer to a group of Big 2, 3 or 4 sports?
Not close enough. New York has two older teams with loyal fan bases and Philadelphia claims most fans of southern NJ. The Devils are in their own little market squeezed between NY and Philly with very little coverage from either of their larger market neighbors. What coverage they do get is usually derisive (looking at you, Mark Everson).
LA is also a large market population-wise, but is not exactly a hockey hotbed. The local news anchors can barely pronounce the names of the players because they haven’t had to cover them in years.
NBCSN is Versus. They rebranded it earlier this year.
It absolutely is. In recent years it’s closed the gap in popularity with the other three sports as its ratings increase and those for baseball and basketball decline.
Hockey is the red-headed stepchild of the nation, in part, because of a Catch-22. National sports stations won’t cover it because it’s not popular enough, but it suffers in popularity because national sports stations won’t cover it. In areas that aren’t as saturated with sporting options like New York is (9 teams in 4 sports), hockey tends to do pretty well. After the local areas whose teams are involved, Buffalo had the highest ratings for Game 1 of the SCF.
Also wanted to add that the ratings drop is not due to the local markets, which are both setting local records, but due to national apathy.
Neither team is “sexy” or boasts more than one or two players the average American could name. Both teams labor under unfair and inaccurate stigmas that, unfortunately, the media does little to dissuade and in many cases reinforce.
But, according to the linked article, the NHL’s ratings are declining.
And to compare it to the NBA, since those 2 are generally considered the bottom 2 rungs of the ladder, the Heat/Celtics series is getting 10 times the viewers. Now, Heat/Celtics is the NBA’s dream matchup for the Eastern Conference Finals, but it’s still not even the NBA Finals. Regardless, if you look at nationwide popularity, I don’t think it’s fair to say the NHL is on the same level as the NBA.
And I realize that most other countries have soccer and everything else, so I guess I’m most curious about Canada. Is it hockey…giant gap…baseball? Football? Curling?
In a way, that’s part of the problem - is there that much support for ice hockey in LA?
How many years was the Stanley Cup Finals “relegated” to SportsChannel America (which meant that I went years without being able to watch them as I lived in an area that was covered by Prime Sports - but at least we got Australian Rules Football)?
NBC Sports Network is (or at least was) Versus (which, in turn was Outdoor Life Network), isn’t it?
What would replace it? College football? NASCAR?
I think it’s still a “Big 4.” In fact, if you exclude the NHL, you may have a better case of excluding MLB as well and having just a “Big 2” than saying there’s a “Big 3.”
Hockey is number one in Canada for sure, no doubt about it. As for the order of the other three, I’m not sure. Football is probably number two, because we enjoy both the NFL and the CFL. I’d say baseball comes next and basketball is barely a blip outside of Toronto. I hope you were being facetious about curling. I watch it and I have friends and family who watch it, but it’s not a popular spectator sport at all.
This article looks at 15 markets where the NHL and NBA compete with one another:
Attendance at games is also up, though I can’t find a supporting link at the moment.
Nationwide the NBA is absolutely more popular, there’s no disputing that, but the NHL has closed the gap and is gaining popularity. The question was whether the NHL was one of the big four sports and I see no reason not to include it.
Note especially Chicago where the Blackhawks handily beat the Bulls. That’s in Chicago, an anchor of the NBA and basketball hotbed, a city with a huge black population and who also happened to have the reigning NBA MVP, best record in basketball 2 years running and are still living of the greatness of the Jordan Bulls. The Bulls are huge here…but the Hawks are bigger. Both are bigger than the White Sox and when the Cubbies suck, like they do this year, they are ahead of them too.
The national ratings have much more to do with the NBCSports/VS connection and the lack of exposure on ESPN than with actual fan popularity. Most people who have NBCS don’t know what channel it is and a huge portion of the country doesn’t have it at all. Compare that to the NFL, MLB and NBA who while also largely on cable are on ESPN, TNT and TBS, channels that people have in their favorites and can recite from memory. On many systems these channels are in the single digits right next to the major networks.
Since a couple peole have mentioned this now, I realize that Versus became NBCSN, but it’s not the same thing. It’s gotta mean something that the network actually carries the NBC name, right?
College football is already much more popular than the NHL, which is why I lump all brands of football together in the Big 4. The same goes for college hoops, of course.
A case could be made that soccer will overtake hockey in the US because of the strong youth movement towards the sport over the last decade or so.
My opinion of hockey is that the games are fun to go to live, but it bores me to watch on TV. I think that attitude is typical of American sports fans. I also think the NHL has done a fabulously horrible job of marketing itself. Maybe they’re out there, but I’ve never seen an advertisement on regular NBC for the Stanley Cup.
And they sure don’t market their stars. The average sports fan could probably recognize twice as many NASCAR drivers, tennis players or golfers as they could hockey players.
Not really. It’s the same coverage crew on the same out-of-the-way channel that people with Dish Network don’t get surrounded by largely the same non-hockey programming (lots of fishing and hunting shows).
They’ve taken steps to air more games, but that probably has more to do with NBC signing a 10 year television deal with the NHL than anything specific to NBC acquiring Versus. On the contrary, it’s likely they did that specifically to have an outlet for NHL games.
Any hockey fan will tell you that games are more fun to attend live, but that could probably be said about any sport. Hockey probably lends itself least to television viewing more than any other sport as it’s very quickly paced and sometimes difficult for novices to locate the puck.
However this opinion doesn’t jibe with the demonstrable recent growth of the game.
On the contrary, there has been public backlash from an over marketing of the League’s stars because many hockey fans do not want the NHL turned into the NBA.
The Commissioner of the League, Gary Bettman, cut his teeth in the marketing department of the NBA (who sets the standard for marketing stars), and while many hockey fans can’t stand the man it cannot be said that he hasn’t helped grow the game.
The issue of “the average American” being able to identify other sporting figures comes back to national coverage. When was the last time you saw anything more than a five minuteblip about the NHL on ESPN, even during these playoffs? Many of the AM radio personalities in the NYC area are openly anti-hockey and refuse to cover it any more than they have to. The local news generally mentions scores and perhaps shows a 15 second highlight package of goals while mispronouncing a players name and moves on. Hockey typically takes a backseat to every other sport in the local paper.
Basically, the places most people go for their sports coverage pretty much unanimously ignore hockey, and in ESPN’s case it’s a clear case of not having a vested interest because they don’t have a TV deal with the NHL and have nothing to gain by the NHL’s success.
I know this isn’t a new thing but I think it’s absurd that the NHL Finals don’t happen until early summer. Hockey and summer just don’t mix. Also the post season is just too damn long and the regular season barely meaningful since 90% of the teams get into the playoffs every year.
I do enjoy watching hockey on TV but if you aren’t in a hockey market it can be hard to find games.
Just to note that that’s an enormous turnaround for the Blackhawks from just 4 or 5 years ago, when the more casual sports fan in Chicago was largely unaware of what the Blackhawks were up to, and it’s safe to say that they were a far-distant 5th among the city’s five teams in the Big 4 sports.
Becoming a winning team (and winning a Stanley Cup), and the decision by Rocky Wirtz to reverse his late father’s policy and (finally!) start televising home games undoubtedly made a huge difference.
So, Americans don’t care about hockey because they can’t find it on TV or they can’t find it on TV because nobody cares about hockey? If that many people wanted to watch it, NBC would put the Stanley Cup on NBC, not NBCSN.
And considering that ESPN stands nothing to gain from hockey, I think they actually do a pretty decent job covering it. Hell, I’d never know who Barry Melrose was without ESPN.
NFL - $9 to $10 billion, depending on the source
MLB - $7.5 billion in 2011
NBA - $4 billion
NHL - $3 billion
NCAA 1-A Football - $2 billion
NCAA Basketball - Maybe $2 billion, it’s hard to tell
Parsing NCAA gross revenue numbers is harder than you think and I can’t vouch for the accuracy of those figures but I got them from a few places and they seem right. Assuming one counts the USA and Canada as one unified sports market I think there remains a solid argument that among team sports the NHL is in the Big 4. The players are’t paid millions of dollars just for kicks.
A very large percentage of the NHL’s revenue (arguably as much as a third of it) comes from its Canadian franchises, so if you limited yourself to American business, there is a much stronger argument for putting NCAA football ahead of it. However, it’s a big deal; a lot of people attend the games and they pay a lot of money to do so. The popularity of the NHL is being seriously underestimated here; it is a sport that commands a lot of fans paying premium prices in person. As has been pointed out, it’s catching up to the NBA. Revenues have gone up every year even through the recession, which is kind of remarkable.
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so I guess I’m most curious about Canada. Is it hockey…giant gap…baseball? Football? Curling?
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Hockey occupies spots 1 through 10. There is no sport in America as important to Americans as hockey is to Canadians, not even close. You could construct an argument that there is no country in the world with a sport more important to them than hockey is to Canadians.
After that the popularity of sports as a spectator event depends on where you are. In Toronto, it obviously is baseball, where there is a major league team owend by a media giant and they’re all over the place, but that is something no other place in Canada has. Although the Blue Jays own territorial rights over all of Canada and do have a lot of fans from across the country by virtue of being Canadian, the great majority of their support in any practical sense comes from Toronto and souther Ontario. So, outside of Toronto it’s football in a clear #2 spot; the CFL is quite popular and the NFL is also very closely followed. (Toronto’s football team is not especially popular and is a second rate attraction next to the baseball team.)
After that it’s a grab bag. Toronto has the Raptors, who are an NBA team, sort of, but again nobody else has a team. University sports aren’t a big deal in Canada. I guess technically soccer would be next just because Canada has three pro teams but it’s still a niche sport. Really, in most of Canada it’s HOCKEY and football, except in Toronto where it’s HOCKEY, baseball, and football.
People don’t go to see curling, funny thought that would be, unelss their hometown happens to be holding the national championships. It’s fun and all and curlers like to watch the championships on TV but it’s not a serious thing.
I know you said it depends on the source for the NCAA numbers, but ESPN actually has a pretty good breakdown.
I copied and pasted the top 40 universities into excel to get a total revenue of:
$3,166,695,386
…which is basketball and football combined.
According to a different site, it looked like NCAA basketball brought in about 25% of what NCAA football does.
Regardless, I know hockey is the biggest thing going in Canada. But here in the US it seems like a 2nd class sport. Is it not at all troubling that nearly as many people are watching Cupcake Wars as the Stanley Cup Finals?
NBC Sports Network is (or at least was) Versus (which, in turn was Outdoor Life Network), isn’t it?