Is Hockey Ready For Prime Time?
When talking about sports in the United States, reference is often made to “the big four” or “the four major sports.” This expression is doing hockey a favor. These days, there is little doubt as to the pecking order- football is king, basketball the ambitious prince next in line for the throne, baseball the venerable duke still trying to maintain himself at court. Ice hockey always, without exception, is meant to be number four. In fact, some count professional and college football as two separate entries, which would leave the NHL out of the big four entirely. It suffers from a number of drawbacks- it is seen as a regional sport, a Canadian sport, a white sport in an increasingly diverse America, all at once. The players wear helmets and face masks, but without the obvious standout player that the NFL presents with the quarterback. And yet, the game of hockey is arguably on the verge of having a breakthrough moment in this country. Although football still sits atop the U.S. sporting throne for now, the crown is starting to lie uneasy on its head. As awareness of the health hazards of playing the game become more and more apparent, kids are participating less and less in youth leagues, potentially choking off the game’s future talent pipeline. Although ratings increased in the NFL’s most recent season, they were down the two prior, another concerning trend. The door is opening for other sports to reach new heights of popularity, and hockey is ideally positioned to do so. I, for one, will be paying closer attention to this upcoming NHL season than ever before, and I will be far from the only one.
The biggest thing that hockey has going for it is that it is an easy, fun game to watch. It’s fast-paced, dynamic, and explosive, with it’s infamous on-ice fighting providing just a bit of the violent edge that football-loving Americans seem to crave in their sports. Furthermore, it is a smooth watching experience, both live and in person. With three twenty minute periods of play, it features far fewer interruptions than either football or baseball, as well as a relatively fixed duration of total play. The game’s lone viewing drawback is that the small puck has often been called hard to follow on television, but the omnipresence of HDTV’s and even high-quality computer video streaming is increasingly solving that issue. The proof is in the pudding- the 2019 Stanley Cup, a seven game thriller between the Boston Bruins and St. Louis set records in both conventional ratings and streaming numbers.
Over the past twenty years, hockey has undergone some significant growing pains as it sought to grow a national audience beyond Canada and the northern United States. It’s expansion into the South, in particular, was a mixed bag- although some southern franchises, such as the Nashville Predators, have flourished, in other cities hockey fell flat- most notoriously Atlanta, whose expansion team had to be sent back North to the comparatively sleepy Canadian town of Winnipeg, which had less than a fifth of Atlanta’s population, but was a die hard hockey town whose residents were thrilled to have the NHL back. The league has become more judicious about its growth of late, with its most recent franchise, the Las Vegas Golden Knights, a smashing success right out of the gate. Not only did the Knights make the Stanley Cup finals in their very first year of play, but they finished fourth in the league in attendance. The next NHL expansion is planned for Seattle in 2021, and if it come even close to replicating Las Vegas’ success, it will build the game in an entire region of the country that has never had an NHL franchise before.
If one thing could arrest the momentum of the NHL’s upward trajectory, it could be that which a fan of any sport dreads the most- a work stoppage. The 1994 baseball strike still lives in infamy twenty five years later, with the sport needing the steroid fueled home run chase of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to even begin to recover in popularity. The NHL has an even more tortured history of disputes between labor and management, with no less than four lockouts in the past thirty years. The NHL Players Association could have chosen to opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement next year, risking yet more labor conflict in the sport. And yet, this potential crisis was averted just this week when the NHLPA announced it would not opt out, guaranteeing labor peace for the next several years.
Take all of the above ingredients, and still something is missing- star quality. In the 1980s and 1990s, Wayne Gretzky transcended hockey to become a household name, but he was a unicorn, an uncommonly rare exception. Tiger Woods became arguably the biggest athlete on the planet, but golf has not even sniffed the popularity level of the biggest American sports. If you asked the average American man on the street to name a hockey player, they likely could not. If they could, the most likely names to come to mind would be Sydney Crosby, a Canadian, and Alexander Ovechkin, a Russian. The sport has not yet had an American star player, but that too may be about to change. In this year’s draft, the New Jersey Devils selected Jack Hughes with the first overall pick. Hughes is a once in a generation talent out of the U.S. National Development Team; if he succeeds, not only will he be hockey’s first American superstar, but one who plays in the country’s biggest media market no less.
All of these factors make for a compelling recipe for hockey to grow, and the signs of that growth are already here. Beyond the aforementioned Stanley Cup ratings, youth participation in the sport in the U.S. is increasing, and this is starting to manifest itself on NHL rosters. The stigma of the sport being “too white” persists, though some top players of color, such as P.K. Subban, have begun to emerge. There is no American city where the NHL team is the most popular (besides the ones where it is the only game in town), at least for now. And perhaps most seriously of all, the sport may have its own concussion issue that may get more scrutiny as the game grows in popularity. The road ahead to grow the sport will still be a challenge. But if one were to look into a sports crystal ball and see twenty years into the future, I would bet on hockey no longer being fourth out of America’s big four.
