Is hockey still part of the "Big 4?"

The Game Room
21

Troubling for whom? I mean, I don’t care.

The assumption here is that the yardstick for popularity is TV ratings. But that’s not the only way pro sports make money. I don’t know if Cupcake Wars gets as many TV viewers (obviously, when you consider local broadcasts, it doesn’t, but whatever) but I do know that there is nowhere in North America where 15,000 people or more pile into an arena, paying upwards of $200 a seat, 41+ times a year, to watch bakers bake cupcakes. NHL ticket sales are in the order of two BILLION dollars a year; Cupcake Wars ticket sales are in the order of “hey, would you like a free seat to be part of a studio audience”?

I mean, hockey’s a third the size of the NFL no doubt, but then Coca-Cola makes less money than Apple; that doesn’t mean you should cry for the poor folks over at Coca-Cola. Hockey’s big enough for itself. It’s a pretty major attraction.

22

:rolleyes:
relative popularity is a matter of fact, not of opinion.

23

In Australia there’s a ‘big two’, maybe a ‘big three’, but what it is depends on where you live.

In New South Wales and Queensland (about half of the country) the big sports are rugby league and cricket, with rugby union a long way back in third place.

In the lesser states, it’s cricket and Aussie rules, with soccer an even longer way back.

I joke about the ‘lesser state’ thing, of course. Queensland is also very much a lesser state.

24

Troubling for the league. Don’t they want people watching their product on TV? Of course there are other measurements of popularity and success, but in sports, TV contracts are where the money is.

25

I’ve never heard of the big 4, it has always been the big 3. Actually the big 2 with basketball being fairly behind the other two.

26

That Catch-22 is a part of it but not all of it, no. The misunderstanding here is that Americans don’t care about hockey. Lots of Americans care about hockey.

They have.

ESPN does a terrible job of covering it, they hardly cover it, and that you can even say that states pretty clearly that you’re not a fan of hockey. They’re on record as saying they won’t cover it because they don’t feel it deserves the attention, forcing hockey fans to rely on Canadian media outlets or other alternatives like SB Nation to get their hockey fix.

You’re better off not knowing who Barry Melrose is.

The League is growing steadily and just signed a 10 year television deal with NBC. I don’t think they’re troubled at all.

27

But… again… the league made more money this year than it did the year before, and made more money that year than the year before, and made more money that year than the year before that.

I don’t exactly understand what the alleged problem is; NHL TV ratings aren’t as high as the NFL? Well, obviously, they would like them to be. They would make more money that way. But the amount of money they’re making now is still, obviously, not only quite a lot, but improving annually. I mean, I am sure Jose Bautista, who makes $13 million a year, would prefer to make $27 million a year like Alex Rodriguez does, but that doesn’t mean Bautista has troubling financial problems, does it?

If your standard of success is the NFL, all the other sports leagues in the world should be “troubled.” But that wouldn’t make any sense. By definition, only one sports league in the world can be the most lucrative sports league in the world.

28

This +1. The league doesn’t need to worry about its TV ratings for another decade, in effect, and I think it has great potential to grow, still. Because of the high entry cost for kids to play hockey versus other team sports, there are entire communities of people in the U.S. where I don’t believe ice hockey simply was part of the culture growing up. A friend of mine on another message board told me how he was the only black kid growing up (that he knew of) who played organized hockey in Pittsburgh. Even with unseemly events a la Joel Ward/Wayne Simmonds/Anson Carter, hockey is becoming less and less of an all-white game, and I think it bodes well for it gaining bigger footholds in the U.S.

29

Here’s an interesting reference. Looks like Australian Rules Football is dominant in Australia, with almost double the 2006 revenue of Rugby League, which isn’t the impression you’d get living in Queensland. Soccer trails far behind, no surprise there.

Wikipedia has Cricket Australia’s 2008 revenue as $146 million, so I reckon the “Big Four” spectator sports in Australia are

ARL
Cricket
NRL
Soccer… maybe

Soccer could probably be replaced by rugby union, auto racing, horse racing, maybe even basketball. I’m having a hard time making reconciling the Wikipedia article’s tables for spectators and media coverage.

30

The Nation Humor League is definitely a second class sport. And that is by their own design. It’s too long a season and the talent is so watered down. IMHO it should not be in any Southern city past the Mason- Dixson line. And more Canadian and border cities should be included. And why oh why is not Cleveland an NHL city? I’m a big Buffalo Sabres fan, but ask me who is in the current playoffs and I could care less. It’s summer and it’s warm weather and i’m outside.

31

Ok, so the NHL is content with what it’s got going right now. Fair enough.

Obviously professional sports leagues should not be measured by the NFL’s revenue. I never said if a league isn’t as successful as the NFL it’s a failure and I never meant that.

What spawned this thread was the horribly low TV ratings of the NHL Stanley Cup Finals. It seems to indicate that the average Joe American sports fans doesn’t care much about hockey. TV ratings are just one tool for measuring success. I get that. But they’re a pretty good way to measure popularity, and if we generally consider NBA and the NHL to be among the least popular sports of the Big 4 in America and the NBA ECF gets 1000% more viewership than the Stanley Cup, how far behind is the NHL? Should it still be considered a Big 4 sport in the US? Hardcore hockey fans say yes. Fair enough. Casual sports fans may or may not disagree.

32

One can’t judge an entire nation’s interest in something on one game in one series. Viewership is down for the Finals, that’s unfortunately a true statement (though honestly expected given the teams involved) but viewership and interest is up everywhere else from the regular season to the Winter Classic on through every other round of the playoffs. One can’t dismiss that growth because the ratings are down in the Finals to say that people don’t care.

33

Because they had their shot and blew it, and now there’s a team just down the road in Columbus. There’s no way the NHL wants two teams that close together; part of the reason for putting the team in Columbus to start with was the hope that they would draw support from the Cleveland and Cincinnati markets as a sort of “Team Ohio” thing.

As to the “Talent being watered down,” that’s absurd. The talent’s as good as it’s ever been.

34

Again, though, going by revenue from all sources, it’s one of the four biggest sports leagues in North America (if you only go by USA, I agree it may be fifth, behind NCAA football.) You are still assuming that only TV viewership of one particular playoff series - this year’s Finals appears to be unusually poorly watched, probably due to the Devils being in it - is the yardstick by which popularity should be measured, and ignoring rather critical things like people actually going to the games.

I think it’s important, too, that we establish whether we’re talking about the USA, or North America. If the former that’s inherently going to exclude much of the NHL, which has seven teams in Canada. If the latter then obviously we must also consider TV ratings in Canada; while Canada has only 1/10th the market of the USA, basically like another California, it would dramatically change the TV numbers. The Stanley Cup Finals always do at least very well here; more Canadians watched the Finals than Americans did, so in the MA market as a while the finals would draw at least half the viewers of the NBA playoffs, not a small fraction.
Incidentally, my #1 sport (and #2 through #18, really) is baseball; I’m in no particular conflict of interest here to defend the NHL.

35

I live in Cleveland, and we can barely support the 3 major league teams we have. I’d love to have an NHL team here, but truthfully, the AHL is more our speed right now.

36

When talking about comparing team sports, I think it makes sense to combine the various levels. Yeah, some people may be more of a fan of college football or basketball over the pros, but it’s still the same sport. It’s not like NCAA Football and the NFL compete with eachother in any meaningful way, really, the NCAA is like the NFL’s minor league, and NCAA Basketball is much the same for the NBA.

That all said, most Americans are familiar with the idea of the big four (team) sports and those being Football, Baseball, Basketball, and Hockey. Yeah, NASCAR probably makes more money or has more fans some of those, but it’s not a team sport. As for whether Hockey should still be in there, I think it should. Yeah, it’s well below Football and Baseball in terms of revenue or whatever so it doesn’t seem like it belongs, but I think you also have to compare it to what the next closest sport is on those terms. What is it, maybe Soccer? Surely, Hockey is head and shoulders above Soccer in terms of revenue and viewership and all of that.

Hockey has also gotten more popular over the last few years since the strike. Yes, the finals aren’t doing as well this year as in the past, but that’s not really indicative of much. Even the mighty Super Bowl will have lower ratings when the two teams are from smaller markets. And while one of the markets in these Finals is LA and it’s a big market, it’s not a Hockey market, as most warm weather markets aren’t. Last year’s finals had a Canadian team and the Boston, both of which are much bigger Hockey markets, so it’s not surprising the ratings are down compared to last year.

It also seems to me that Hockey culture is a bit different than other sports. I’m a football fan myself and I’ve been to a few games, but I also know tons of football fans who have never been to a game or have only been to one or two. Part of that is the obnoxious cost of going to a game, and part of that is that one can be a pretty big football fan without needing to go to a game, even more so in the age of Fantasy Football, where people have less loyalty to a specific team and want to watch multiple games simultaneously to keep up. OTOH, I know a few Hockey fans, and I think all of them go to several games each season and have much more loyalty in general.

So I’d say, yeah, as much as we’re going to have a big number for team sports, I think the most logical point would be after Hockey rather than higher up.

37

In a sense it is.

Pnning down NASCAR revenues is, I find, surprisingly hard. The organization has good TV revenues and merchandising sales but by virtue of the nature of the sport they cannot sell as many tickets as other sports can.

That said, you make an interesting point about tiers. The NHL may not be as big as baseball or football, but below that there’s a huge gulf between hockey and, well, any other team sport. Major League Soccer is miniscule as compared to the NHL and is in a state of perpetual fiscal worry. I live in Toronto, which has one of the league’s few profitable teams, Toronto FC, and to be honest I’ve never actually met, face-to-face, a Toronto FC fan. They do apparently exist - the stadium holds 20,000 fans and it’s full for every game - but I think it’s the same 20,000 people every time out. I don’t even understand how the league works. The team will go weeks in the middle of the season without playing a league game, but play exhibition games, and then they made it to a “Champions Cup” thing even though the team has never made the playoffs; it’s all really hard to understand from the perspective of a guy used to the North American pro sports template, but I guess European immigrants can make sense of it. To most people it’s weird and baffling.

38

The MLS is far behind the NHL in terms of pretty much everything, I’m sure. But soccer has been lauded as the fastest growing sport in the US for so long, I wonder if it will ever catch hockey. Probably not as long as the world’s best professional players aren’t playing here.

39

Soccer is arguably the most popular participation sport in the USA. In that regard it grew very fast indeed. There’s a reason we call them “soccer moms,” and not “baseball moms” or “basketball moms.”

However, what people watch and what they play are often very different things.

40

But that’s the thing with soccer, it may very well be the most popular youth sport, but that’s a big part of it’s problem, that it’s seen as a kids game. It’s also the sports equivalent of the Metric system. But when I think of the concept behing the big 4, it’s about the sport at a profressional level, and that gulf from Hockey to soccer is just huge.