Could NHL surpass NBA?
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Pavel Buchnevich
"Pavel Buchnevich The Fake"
Could? Yes.
Will? Not likely.
NBA is a dying product, but the NHL has very poor leadership and they don’t seem to want to grow their brand. I don’t think they’ll be able to take advantage of the NBA’s fall in that sense.
Will? Not likely.
NBA is a dying product, but the NHL has very poor leadership and they don’t seem to want to grow their brand. I don’t think they’ll be able to take advantage of the NBA’s fall in that sense.
NBA honestly just needs some rule changes and maybe some CBA changes to disincentivize load management. Reduce the number of late game time outs also.
Push the 3 point line out and make contracts heavy on performance bonuses based on playing X number of games, then allow teams to play more 90s/early 2000s style defense.
NHL has a much harder path because it's a winter sport on ice and fundamentally getting people in the US to care about that when like 60% of the US population doesn't even have a proper winter is a big issue.
Push the 3 point line out and make contracts heavy on performance bonuses based on playing X number of games, then allow teams to play more 90s/early 2000s style defense.
NHL has a much harder path because it's a winter sport on ice and fundamentally getting people in the US to care about that when like 60% of the US population doesn't even have a proper winter is a big issue.
GrumpyKoala
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SkinsFan09
Registered User
Too expensive, not racially diverse enough and the NHL is horrible at marketing.
Honour Over Glory
#firesully
- Jan 30, 2012
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NBA isn't the bar I would bother trying to aim for or set to be close to. That entire league is a joke, it's the league you never want to be remotely like in any sense of the word.
I'm always shocked NBA is still popular to be honest, the insane league tampering issues they turn a blind eye to, the biggest babies in any sport where they literally take their ball and go home because they don't want to play for a team anymore, zero integrity in that sport and it's not like the NHL doesn't have its warts, Bettman and his joke handling of series topics and situations, the league's department of player safety being comically bad, etc.
The NBA is just worse and their decline will happen, the NHL just needs to keep doing better at marketing the game and get better leadership in place, Bettman needs to go and they need to get better people in that aren't nepo/crony hires and are actually qualified for the job to bring the NHL forward and into the spotlight more.
4 Nations showed a lot of non-hockey fans just how damn good it is to watch, the Olympics back with NHL attendance is also massive. As well as the sport being on a better network last year showed the ratings are there, the year before last, it showed just how much it drops when you get the wrong network involved and last season wasn't some huge jump, it was back to the jump it was at for finals ratings when they just get the sport onto the right network for fans to consume.
Amazon was a great choice but the lack of games is awful, it should be a lot more available and the blackouts, that bullshit needs to end, you shouldn't be struggling with blackouts when you're trying to grow the sport and it doesn't matter what network has the game, that should never be an issue.
I'm always shocked NBA is still popular to be honest, the insane league tampering issues they turn a blind eye to, the biggest babies in any sport where they literally take their ball and go home because they don't want to play for a team anymore, zero integrity in that sport and it's not like the NHL doesn't have its warts, Bettman and his joke handling of series topics and situations, the league's department of player safety being comically bad, etc.
The NBA is just worse and their decline will happen, the NHL just needs to keep doing better at marketing the game and get better leadership in place, Bettman needs to go and they need to get better people in that aren't nepo/crony hires and are actually qualified for the job to bring the NHL forward and into the spotlight more.
4 Nations showed a lot of non-hockey fans just how damn good it is to watch, the Olympics back with NHL attendance is also massive. As well as the sport being on a better network last year showed the ratings are there, the year before last, it showed just how much it drops when you get the wrong network involved and last season wasn't some huge jump, it was back to the jump it was at for finals ratings when they just get the sport onto the right network for fans to consume.
Amazon was a great choice but the lack of games is awful, it should be a lot more available and the blackouts, that bullshit needs to end, you shouldn't be struggling with blackouts when you're trying to grow the sport and it doesn't matter what network has the game, that should never be an issue.
Surpass? No. Not a chance. But the longer the NBA continues to be a watered down and boring product relative to, say, 10 years ago, the NHL could make up some ground on the gap that widened between the two leagues the past 20-30 years.
Honour Over Glory
#firesully
- Jan 30, 2012
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I look forward to the moment when Byfield, Parekh, K.Miller, etc are all representing their countries and are bigger stars in the sport. Diversity is good and the NHL lacks it severely and they need to change that. All the whiners about not caring about that don't seem to understand why its important and explaining why is pointless.
One of the worst things the league did was allow the Thrashers to be bought and moved, their attendance was never the issue that made them a target to be moved, it was shit ownership and an arena in a better location. That team had fans and a lot of loyal ones, I'd rather see a team there than New Orleans.
Bettman protected so many teams for a long time and the moment the Thrashers had a buyer, let them bounce immediately, absolute clown of a Commissioner.
What was their biggest recent hype moment? Lebron playing with his son? Now most of the league is saying the Lakers made a huge deal out of it and the lad isn't even remotely ready to play in the league nor was he worth taking as high as he was taken.
Suntouchable13
Registered User
I still don't buy it. Sure, as a kid used to play street hockey but that was 20+ years ago now. I also never picked up a baseball bat or a glove in my life, but I love watching baseball. So I don't buy it that you have to play something in order to follow it.
You don’t have to, no, but it certainly helps. It’s unfair to write it off as a complete non-factor.
I agree it's not necessary but it certainly can help. Hockey being a sport played on ice, effectively a winter sport is also an issue. Winter sports are just less popular than so-called "summer sports". The Summer Olympics always have way higher TV ratings than the Winter Olympics.
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In an alternate universe where ice rinks are cheaper and more prevalent than basketball courts and compositve hockey sticks and skates cost less than a basketball and hoop, maybe it would be possible.
tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
That’s what I mean, though. What’s the difference between street hockey and street football? Knee hockey with dad in the basement and throwing a ball with dad in the back yard? Those forms of participation are super accessible and near universal.
The number of Americans who play football is negligible. At the elementary school level (Pop Warner) you’re talking maybe a couple of kids per classroom, and only in places populated enough to field a league. At the middle school level the teams are like 30 kids. High school you get up to a couple hundred participants in a larger school, maxing out around 300 at the absolute largest football-crazy Texas public schools — 300 players out of thousands of students. And it’s very heavily gendered with virtually no girls involved.
But you go to an NFL game and it’s a roughly evenly mixed crowd of men and women, including many who never played a snap in their lives. They’re not engaged because of prior playing experience. It’s more cultural than that, more about shared experience and food and family and shared drama.
Same logic applies to the popularity of motorsports. How many people have ever actually raced a car? But 100K show up for the experience of a race.
On the other side of the coin, it’s not a guarantee either. I played competitive tennis for a while and don’t care about watching tennis, for example.
...that's why you're soo tired now...catching up for all that activity when you were younger...need to be lazier...
...that's why you're soo tired now...catching up for all that activity when you were younger...need to be lazier...
Hey, I’d love to still play hockey if I could. The fact that the nearest ice rinks to me require me to drive almost two hours one way wouldn’t be a deterrent.
tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
I don’t like saying this, but it is a reality — if you want to make the NHL significantly more popular in the States short-term, it’s going to mean turning it into more of a blood sport. Go the way of Don Cherry and openly play up fighting, loosen up rules against big hits, get really loud about “the code” and other things that appeal to the large untapped demographic which is currently gravitating away from team sports toward UFC and wrestling.
Frankly, blood sells. If that’s all you care about.
Now, that also likely means you lose a bunch of top players to injury, which kills the brand long-term. We’ve been down that path and it led straight to empty seats, games on OLN, and a lockout. But for a short period of time there was a crossover between quality hockey and cartoonish violence, and the NHL was never more popular.
Half the population? Black people make up a lot less than 50%
there are millions and millions of white people in the states to attract unlike here in Canada and why there's an onus on US expansion in non-traditional markets.
The NHL doesn't need to attract NBA viewers who like the NHL are more niche albeit a bigger one.
The NHL in order to truly become massive is convert the MLB, NFL, and people that don't really follow sports religiously and it seems more best on best international events is a good start.
Adding a few more teams in the right untapped market like they've been doing and expanding the whole prime thing imo would also be huge
There's plenty of POC who love the sport and will watch and play but the NHL needs to focus on the demographic that traditionally watches, stay away from woke agendas and insane progressive shit like the NFL and NBA do which is extremely unpopular. The NHL is tailor made for 70 million Americans who want to watch a sport that doesn't shove an agenda down your throat and that's all I'll say about that.
...I'd luv to pick it back up myself, but old age and health...and the price of Goalie gear is ridiculous; paying for my Grandson's now...
I agree that today's NBA is a dogshit product between league tampering, players who don't give a ghost of a shit about playing intense ball, etc. But the problem is the same with hockey as it's always been: it's an expensive sport mostly played by rich or at least upper middle class white kids.
This bleeds into a trickle down issue where hockey finds itself competing with baseball which still runs on the fumes of being America's pass time since before the world wars, and basketball and football which are inexpensive sports that translates into them being massive high school athletics draws which translates into being huge in college, which translates into a huge pool of fans at the pro level.
Hockey just doesn't have that draw. The markets where college hockey does reasonably well are, primarily, cold weather cities but even those markets, the NCAA is dominated by basketball and football.
The NBA is just marketed better and have been a bigger draw for longer. And where the NBA is losing fans, most of them will just jump over to NCAA basketball.
NBA has a LOT of time to fix what's wrong before they have to worry about the NHL passing it. I do agree it's declining at the moment though.
tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
Part of the conversation here is also not so much about POC per se, but attracting the large part of the market which isn’t currently engaged with the NHL.
NBA has a much larger hold on the imagination of the general/casual sports fan. One thing that has become very clear over the years is that a big chunk of the NBA’s ratings comes from people who follow the league very broadly, mainly interested in seeing marquee matchups with specific players of interest. This is part of what’s killing their ratings as LeBron/Curry matchups lose relevance and there really isn’t a player like them on the horizon. Whereas the NHL is much more tribal and driven by specific fanbases showing up in force (e.g. a Leafs/Bruins game in the first round will have viewership comparable to Ducks/Sens in the Finals) with a lot less emphasis on general trends (e.g. last year’s Finals featured Connor McDavid, but the ratings reflected the low popularity of the Edmonton Oilers).
That dynamic leaves the NHL struggling to even to compete with the NBA, never mind surpassing them, because the NHL doesn’t truly create the same big-tent atmosphere where everyone cares about the big game. This is what the NFL does better than anyone else, especially with the Super Bowl where the whole continent stops and parties around the game regardless of the teams involved. The last time anyone even talked about the NHL maybe catching up to the NBA, it was because a legendary NYR/VAN Game 7 created the illusion of a big-tent event for one night. But the NBA does that every year, multiple times a year, because they authentically capture the interest of sports fans in general.
Which comes back to POC. It’s not necessarily about diversifying the audience per se (although obviously some people feel it is just about that) but about: how do you create appeal to the general population of fans if you’re not relevant to some 50% of them right off the bat? Yes you can go deeper with the white demographic, but there’s a realistic cap on just how much you can gain by trying to squeeze the last drop out of that half of the pie. At some point you get to declining returns and find yourself losing ground to a league that goes deep on both halves of the pie. And the more generally popular the NBA becomes, the less relevant the NHL will be perceived, so you get into a feedback loop of negative results.
So ultimately there really does have to be a plan for how hockey stops being the “white sport” and achieves a broader popularity. It’s happening in very small fits and starts, but I’m not sure it’s even outpacing the speed at which the population is diversifying.
Coming back to the OP, there’s actually something sitting under our nose which could be a key to all of this — for the first time in years, the Four Nations tournament actually did create a big-tent event that drew general/casual attention across the board. It turns out that the general public loves a heated, tribalistic international rivalry. We should probably have figured this out after the Miracle on Ice, or the record ratings of the 1994 and 2011 Finals, or when Disney made multiple movies about the USA succeeding in international hockey.
While the NBA has raced out to the huge audiences in China and others, one card they can’t pull is Team USA being the scrappy up-and-comer, physically fighting other nations for supremacy. That’s got mass appeal that could actually surpass the Stanley Cup itself in the popular imagination.
NFL - Popularity primarily due to gambling, drama off the court, and has its history within American culture as what you do after church on Sunday. It also helps that you don't have to dedicate that much time to watch it, though the amount of allotted would suggest otherwise.
MLB - Declining sport, but still part of American history and people will fight tooth and nail to bring it back to its glory days. It's also part of the "typical summer thing to do" which largely helps.
NBA - Lots of issues surrounding the game but they are fixable. They became part of American pop culture in the 90's and kept growing from there and the amount of drama that the league and players produce allows them the keep the gravy train running.
The above three sports are all where they are because of being part of what is considered "Americana". The other element is that all of those sports have strong ties to middle and high schools and then even moreso in college. It's part of the school culture that you simply can't escape.
Hockey is a foreign game played only in cold places by white people, not part of the school system (for the most part), becoming increasingly expensive, and still for the most part looked down up by the media as a whole. ***By the way, this is me describing hockey if I were the average non hockey loving person***.
I don't know if it will be like that forever but things that are not considered "Americana" have a hard time pushing through.
MLB - Declining sport, but still part of American history and people will fight tooth and nail to bring it back to its glory days. It's also part of the "typical summer thing to do" which largely helps.
NBA - Lots of issues surrounding the game but they are fixable. They became part of American pop culture in the 90's and kept growing from there and the amount of drama that the league and players produce allows them the keep the gravy train running.
The above three sports are all where they are because of being part of what is considered "Americana". The other element is that all of those sports have strong ties to middle and high schools and then even moreso in college. It's part of the school culture that you simply can't escape.
Hockey is a foreign game played only in cold places by white people, not part of the school system (for the most part), becoming increasingly expensive, and still for the most part looked down up by the media as a whole. ***By the way, this is me describing hockey if I were the average non hockey loving person***.
I don't know if it will be like that forever but things that are not considered "Americana" have a hard time pushing through.
MVP of West Hollywd
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I'm of the opinion that young Gen Z and Alpha are going to be a bit different psychologically due to social media being a paradigm shift, so what it means for sports popularity or ranking is unpredictable. And if it happens, it may not be in a way that has clearcut reasons or flaws in the sport or league. So yes there is some small % chance they end up into hockey. But if something shifts I'd probably pick MLB reclaiming #2 over NHL passing NBA.
I don't see that happening until the MLS can get the best players in the world during their prime. That's the thing about the big 4. They all have the best players the world has to offer in their respective sports. If you ask an MLS fan who their favourite soccer player is, they probably aren't going to name someone that actually plays in the MLS.
