I know it is a Canadian/Europeanized sport.
But why isn’t hockey heavily discussed in America?
Even in the New York metropolitan area, you don’t hear much Rangers/Devils/Islanders/Flyers enthusiasm like the Knicks/NY Giants/Yankees day in and day out.
The only hockey players Americans still talk about daily are Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier and Mario Lemieux, guys that haven’t played in the ice since the late 1990s and 2000s.
Why?
Could depend on the area. The Penguins get pretty much near equal time with the Steelers and the Pirates. (Although I think the Steelers will ALWAYS be king) It could be just because we’re such a big sports town in general, or that we’ve been so lucky to have so many great athletes.
And as you mentioned, Mario Lemieux. No, he hasn’t played in over 10 years, but he IS the team’s owner, so I’d say that probably has something to do with it. (He and his family are also involved in a number of charitable organizations as well – the Mario Lemieux Foundation, Austin’s Playroom, etc)
The first part of hockey season competes with 4 days of NFL/college/high school football. The end of the season competes with baseball. And the entirety of the season competes with NBA/college basketball. All of those sports are more popular than the NHL, so outside of hockey-crazy areas it gets put below the fold, as it were.
That’s a shame. While hockey can’t compete with football it’s a better game than basketball and far more action packed than baseball. HDTV has been a big help for hockey because on a low resolution CRT TV the puck was hard to follow. The sport just never grew the way the others did in the US.
Yeah, I’d say it depends on the area. The Nashville Predators have been a constantly successful team but football is still king in Tennessee. Same with Columbus Ohio. The Blue Jackets have been more successful lately, but tune into Columbus sports talk radio when the Jackets are in the playoffs and you’ll hear mostly talk about the OSU spring game.
But in Chicago, I’d say the Blackhawks get the third most attention after the Cubs and Bears.
There’s also a bias because ESPN doesn’t broadcast the NHL so they don’t cover it much. Hockey playoffs could be in full swing but ESPN will be showing yet some other expert’s mock NFL draft.
It had a big flash of popularity in the '90s, right about when they expanded further and added teams like Anaheim and San Jose. But then it dropped off.
plus press coverage seems to have withered as well. ESPN treats it as 2nd tier now because they seem to have some sort of corporate mandate to try to force people to care about soccer.
Hockey fans don’t want to hear it, but hockey lacks a bigger fanbase in America because of the fighting. If you had fights like that in basketball, people would call them animals.
Sorry, I don’t buy that.
drops gloves
You wanna go??
WAG: Hockey isn’t as popular to watch or discuss as other major sports (at least in America) because fewer people played it as kids. The “barriers to entry” are higher than with other sports: you have to have ice skates and be able to get around quickly and easily on them, and you have to have a special place to play a game of hockey.
Yet everyone plays soccer as a kid, even I played it in high school. You just need to not fall down in grass to play it. And it’s arguably less popular than hockey.
Look at the stats. Fighting numbers have been in a steady decline for years. Cite from last year.
The main thing is that hockey translates terribly to TV. But, if you get people out to see live action hockey they get hooked.
Hockey doesn’t have nationwide appeal so it’s not going to be a major subject on sports TV shows. There’s no more coverage of hockey in print because the last hockey fan who could read died recently. In cities with hockey teams there’s a lot of coverage when the playoffs begin after two teams are eliminated in the regular season.
Hockey is pretty strongly popular in some areas of the US, such as Minnesota, and the Detroit area. I remember visiting the Twin Cities some years ago in March, when the state high school hockey tournament was going on, and it had wall-to-wall coverage on one of the Minneapolis TV stations.
But, I get the sense that, in most areas of the US in which hockey is popular, it’s still often not the most popular sport – the OP gives the example of New York, which has three NHL teams (including the Devils), but they’re competing for attention with two NFL teams, two MLB teams, and two NBA teams, most of which are probably more popular, in the absolute, than the Rangers and Islanders.
dalej42 mentioned the Blackhawks, here in Chicago - the Hawks won three Stanley Cups this decade, and as they did so at a time when most of the other Chicago teams were doing badly, they got a lot of attention here. But, the Hawks’ decline over the past four years happened at the same time as the Cubs’ ascendency, and as the Blackhawks are now terrible, they don’t get much press anymore.
Part if it is momentum, It’s not popular partly because it’s not popular. Another part is advertising. In the US the money is heavy into american football.
When Hockey really took off was when the US took the gold at the olympics, which was not hockey popularity so much as olympic popularity that hockey ‘stole’ for itself, then around that time the Islandards took the Stanley Cup away from a Canadian team and held it for 4 years, so we had the excitement of the drama of the game as well as national pride that we were the winners here to hold attention. But after they lost, people started to slip away from hockey and football was pulling them with big money ads.
It’s not just that they didn’t play hockey as kids, but for the most part, it wasn’t played in middle school, high school or college for most people either. Soccer at least checks all those boxes, even if it’s not popular.
Meanwhile, people played football, baseball and basketball from childhood all the way through, and there’s a huge fan base and established popular college and professional leagues in those sports.
Canada has that sort of thing in hockey (well, jr. hockey instead of high school I gather), and the Europeans have that with soccer.
Another way to look at it is to consider what level of understanding or interest your average Joe in Tennessee or Oregon would have with respect to hockey. They’d surely know the basics- played on ice, people wear skates, hit pucks into goals with sticks, contact sport, and players fight a lot. They would be likely to know that Nashville has a NHL team, and that there are NHL teams in California and Vancouver (maybe). But as far as the rules and players and everything else? They’d likely have no clue.
In large part, exposure brings success, and success brings more exposure. But there has to be that foundation of familiarity that hockey just doesn’t have in the US. I have a feeling that soccer may have just enough familiarity to take over the fourth major sport crown from hockey, if it hasn’t already.
If you’re talking about the Miracle on Ice then I think it only gave hockey a small bump. The old NHL American teams were competitive against Canadian teams before then. The Flyers were the first expansion team to win the Stanley Cup before then and they might have provided a bigger bump to the sport.
The biggest increase in popularity for hockey comes from the advanced video that allows the puck to be seen on TV. That might have been offset by the decreased popularity from players wearing helmets and not knowing how to fight anymore.
that’s what I don’t get. it’s actually an exciting, fast-paced game to watch. Baseball bores me to tears (20 minutes of action packed into 3 hours) and football is not much better with all of the stoppages and reviews. Soccer may be a great game to play but I can’t get into watching it. 90+ minutes for a 0-0 tie isn’t all that engaging.
It should also be pointed out that, for a long time (from the mid-1970s into the 1990s), the NHL didn’t have a national TV contract in the US (or when it did, it was a limited schedule). TV coverage was a patchwork of syndication, local coverage, and coverage by cable sports networks (ESPN and SportsChannel). If one didn’t live in a market that had an NHL team, seeing more than a few hockey games a year on TV (even seeing the Stanley Cup games) could be challenging.
The NHL has a lot better coverage on TV here now, thanks to a contract with NBC, but you had generations of sports fans who grew up with little exposure to hockey, especially compared to baseball and football.
Soccer is slowly but surely on the rise. MLS has better average attendance than NHL and is catching up in ratings. Plus all the other leagues that are broadcast. I see a lot of fans of various international teams. I never see any fans of non-NHL hockey teams.
Ah, but the OP’s question wasn’t “Why isn’t hockey heavily watched?” It’s “why isn’t hockey heavily discussed?”
A sport, like a movie, that is all action and no plot may be fun to watch but leave relatively little to discuss. I don’t know much about hockey, but I think one of the strengths of baseball or football is that it does give fans so much to discuss: the strategy, the choices made by players and coaches/managers, the moments when something exciting or noteworthy does happen.