We all knew that the NHL had plummeted to relative obscurity in the U.S., but who knew it would drop this far. The sport that was once considered in the top four has been through a bad, bad stretch. The year-long lockout didn't help anything, and neither did its getting dropped by ESPN. To make matters worse, Anaheim's 3-2 victory over Ottawa in the opening game of the Stanley Cup Finals netted a paltry 0.72 rating on obscure cable station Versus.What does that mean exactly? Well it means that only 523,000 households watched the game in the U.S. But perhaps what it really further illustrates is that nobody cares about hockey in the U.S. any more. The rating was down 18% from last year's opening game, which had a 0.88 rating. Here's a way to put things in perspective: The capacity for Ducks games at the Honda Center is 17,174. The team could match the overall viewership for Game One by selling out just 31 home games. Or another way - Versus reaches 73 million homes, which means that less than 1% of it possible audience watched the game.
Simply put, the NHL has no fans south of the border. Ratings are bound to increase when the series shifts to NBC after Game 2, but much of that will come from drop-in traffic. But if you want to use a true metric of real NHL fans, the Versus games are the ones to look at. They are the real fans that sought out the game. They are the ones who fought through the TV Guide and found Versus on channel 42,446. These 523,000 are the last real American NHL fans standing.
Edit: I hear that the local NBC affiliate in San Diego cut the last few minutes of Saturday's Game 3 Ottawa win over the Ducks so they could show Wheel of Fortune in HD instead. That sums of the state of the NHL in the U.S.
