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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Vegas Golden Knights tripled down on their \u201cSuccess over everything and damn all the rest of you\u201d identity with the signing of Carter Hart, while also canning their coach just before the season\u2019s 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\u2019re doing right now, it would be these two teams.<\/p>\n
Were their paths a little wonky? Sure, that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Which is why it\u2019s so frustrating to me that, of all the things we\u2019re 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\u2019re not even talking about shots on goal or save percentage\u2026we\u2019re talking about graphs of people being extrapolated from what is essentially polling data.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s most recent offering Marshals; specifically one of the very few things on modern TV that get any ratings at all, wouldn\u2019t 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<\/a>, would be kicking Marshals\u2019 ass by a whole point and change, and that got canned after two seasons.<\/p>\n In the present day, the rise of the internet has created so many devious ways to advertise to people that we can\u2019t 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!<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s cultural relevance remains stronger than the NHL\u2019s, 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s crowd audio is too high and ESPN\u2019s is too low.<\/p>\n