The Stanley Cup Playoffs are tomorrow, and from there the Carolina Hurricanes and the Vegas Golden Knights will wage war to add to their trophy cases. The storylines for both sides are quite impressive; Carolina’s plays for goalscoring value have been largely undercut by the ramifications of the Mikko Rantanen trade being, in hindsight, a screaming victory for them as opposed to anybody they sent the other way. Headed up by former blogger-boy Eric Tulsky, the Canes have seemingly tripled down on their fancystats
gawds reputation and have absolutely torched the playing field of the Eastern Conference.
Meanwhile, the Vegas Golden Knights tripled down on their “Success over everything and damn all the rest of you” identity with the signing of Carter Hart, while also canning their coach just before the season’s end to let John Tortorella be the figurehead of their surprising rise through the Western Conference given how weak their division was and how flimsily they played in the regular season. If you wanted two teams that were, by the numbers, some of the best in the world at what they’re doing right now, it would be these two teams.
Were their paths a little wonky? Sure, that’s the playoff format for you. But has it created a decent matchup? I would argue yes, for hockey sickos like myself who love watching teams strangle the other team out of the game through systems play, this is absolutely My S#!t right here.
Which is why it’s so frustrating to me that, of all the things we’re whining about in the leadup to this cup final, a pretty outsized group of fans are going back to this old well: Ratings. Television Ratings. We’re not even talking about shots on goal or save percentage…we’re talking about graphs of people being extrapolated from what is essentially polling data.
Now, is Mister Livingstone an extremely content-brained Avs fan working for three extremely content-brained Toronto fans? Yes. Is he also putting out in plain english a sentiment I have seen over and over and over again regarding NHL ratings? Also yes! So we are going to interrogate this.
While their methodologies and how they use them has changed over time; TV Ratings have been and continue to be useful for one thing; helping advertisers and networks see which programs they should be selling ads for and by extension whether or not a show continues to see network support. Back in the day, this really used to be everything. The Yellowstone extended universe’s most recent offering Marshals; specifically one of the very few things on modern TV that get any ratings at all, wouldn’t even be in the top 100 of thirty years ago; Muppets Tonight, a fun but unfocused continuation of the Muppet Show that you just learned (or remembered) existed, would be kicking Marshals’ ass by a whole point and change, and that got canned after two seasons.
In the present day, the rise of the internet has created so many devious ways to advertise to people that we can’t easily get around with adblockers and scripts, and more ways than ever before to get your show in front of eyeballs; not just the computer box, but now the lapped top and the cellular telephone, and their fancy applications that run on all three! Hell, even the TV itself is a simple computer now, and it can run all of those as well!
This makes traditional Nielsen metrics a little hard to really scale properly; less people have cable, even less use OTA broadcast (though that is improving!), and more and more people want to stream their stuff. What was once fodder for cancellation now could end up like Yellowstone for the sheer simplicity of it being something that the remaining TV audience as it exists right now likes to watch. It is genuinely a different world.
This Stanley Cup Final meanwhile? Will probably do okay in this new paradigm! Maybe not to the level of the NBA Finals, which tends to gather more interest as it’s cultural relevance remains stronger than the NHL’s, but it will likely do very well because of one simple change; This Final is going to be on ABC; one of the few stations in America to have offerings on streaming, cable, and over-the-air in all 50 states, for the entire series. For all our complaining about how access to sports is now broken up onto million different platforms, we should be celebrating that the National Hockey League somehow made the right call in making sure there was one place both on terrestrial television and on streaming that most people recognize and can easily find; a lightyears-level improvement over just a decade ago where people were digging into their cable packages to see if their local carrier had updated the outdoor life channel into being Versus/NBCSN.
Are the broadcasts themselves perfect? Jesus christ no; the fact that the ESPN crew will be doing the Cup final makes me desperate for a sweep if only to get the most actively repellent group of men who talk about this sport the hell off my TV. Most of the stars are still giving the same stilted, boring, hockey robot canned answers that tells us nothing about them as personalities. Audio mixing is a weird problem where TNT’s crowd audio is too high and ESPN’s is too low.
But the one thing? The single biggest issue that I previously noted as a central problem with NHL Broadcasts going back to 2023? That’s access…and by and large that’s been solved for this playoffs, and especially for this round. The Stanley Cup Final is in one place, and you can get to that one place from just about anything with a screen.
As for why we keep coming back to this well; I imagine it’s a bit of coping. Coping that because their team didn’t make it, and so there’s this desire for the Finals to underperform so that the league can be financially punished for allowing two non-traditional markets go to the Finals. Two non-traditional markets that built better hockey teams than ones in traditional markets, and played the same games as bigger market squads.
This will…well, I don’t really know what the plan is after that; I assume either move the team to somewhere else like Quebec City or get an autobid for larger markets? Or something like that?
Personally? I go the other way. I think the league should financially punish those bigger market teams for not showing up after a certain number of years. My Reasoning? Simple! I thought you liked this sport better! I thought you had money! I thought your fans had money! To put up rinks! To get players! Get stars, even! I thought you had better support structures in place than those NASCAR-lovin’ hilljacks with a blogger and Gamblingtown, USA! I thought hockey was all about earning it! Why aren’t you!?*
I just can’t get my head around caring about this in 2026. If you work at a TV station and you get a bonus for audience share, then good for you, man. For everyone else, it’s the same thing as trying to do power scaling for corporations and that makes you look like the biggest dork imaginable. Those kids painting Warhammer figurines at hobby stores should be allowed to swirlie you if they catch you in the streets pointing to this kind of stuff.
There are plenty of decent reasons to not care about this final and plenty more to not like either team. You don’t need graphs to tell you that, and if I’m saying that? Mr. Hot Shit Graph and Chart Appreciator? I promise you, you don’t need to care about it.
* = Because the Public’s Collective Media Literacy in 2026 is In Hell, I feel a moral obligation to let you know this is in fact a Joke for funny laughs.
