The first two rounds of the NHL's Stanley Cup Playoffs are the most-watched in the U.S. in league history.
Women are the primary driver of that growth.
TNT Sports reported female viewership is up 66% and ESPN reported a 106% increase, with plenty of that audience coming from 18-to-34-year-olds tuning in to hockey at its most exciting time of year.
“We see the numbers up everywhere,” ESPN VP of production Linda Schulz said. “(Hockey) is a particular challenge
because sports fans tend to follow something that they themselves have participated in and hockey is one that is not as commonplace for people to have actually strapped on skates. I approach it with, if I get a new fan coming to hockey, what is going to keep them."
What's bringing fans in, Schulz and other executives said, is a result of a handful of factors. The success of the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament last year, the Olympics in February when the U.S. men and women won gold, the quality of play, an influx of young talent and the viral popularity of the “Heated Rivalry” and “Off Campus” hockey romance shows have combined to bring more women to the sport.
“It’s not any one thing,” TNT Sports executive VP and chief content officer Craig Barry said. “It’s the collective of the planets aligning that has shown dramatic increases in the female audience.”
The NHL says the playoffs are averaging 1.4 million viewers, up 63% from last year and up 24% from the previous high set in 2024. Some of the increase can be attributed to a change in how Nielsen is counting viewers, causing bumps across the board, though hockey has been seeing an upward trend in viewership predating that.
That began after the 4 Nations, which NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said caused a viewership increase late in the 2024-25 season and into the playoffs. The Olympics built off that, with the Milan Cortina Games drawing huge ratings.
"The Olympics was a cultural moment," NHL chief operating officer Stephen McArdle said. “We know that Olympic viewership does appeal to those demographics, to that female demographic, and so I think the Olympic bump that we saw was really in part influenced by that female Olympic audience.”
How big a role “Heated Rivalry” plays is difficult to measure. Schulz, who grew up as a sports fan in the Boston area, said it does not enter her mind, but the networks and the league are well aware of the conversation going around it.
“We know that the fictional series are a gateway to our sport,” McArdle said. “We know that it opens doors to an interest in the sport of hockey, and it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that new audiences that are coming through those doors feel welcomed as they come in, and also that we help them find their way through the door.”
Schulz said technology helps with that, pointing to aerial sky cams that highlight the speed and physicality of the game, and the addition of a camera person on the ice to capture emotional moments like a player expressing frustration after getting called for a penalty.
“It is incredible how that emotional draw, to me, is the real way to pull in a casual fan,” Schulz said. “It’s that balance of getting the feel of the ice through something like your aerial coverage and the feel of the player or the emotion of the player.”
McArdle said the NHL has also leaned into TikTok, where many of the top videos were viewed by more women than men. A clip of Carolina's Jordan Martinook losing a skate blade particularly stood out as something that was popular beyond highlight-reel goals, saves and hits.
Social media has drawn in more young fans, men and women, and promotion of broadcasts on ESPN, ABC, TNT, TruTV and on HBO Max has gotten them to watching live on one platform or another.
"That’s why it’s so important to meet them where they are," Barry said. “That’s why our kind of strategy is put it everywhere in a simulcast capacity, so regardless of where you are consuming and digesting your content, in this particular case, NHL games, it’s there for you.”
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AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
