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Patrick Johnston: No one should be playing hockey on June 24. Let’s push the schedule forward.
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Published May 31, 2024 • Last updated 13 hours ago • 3 minute read
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Alex Wennberg of the New York Rangers scores the game winning goal against Sergei Bobrovsky of the Florida Panthers during overtime in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Final of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Amerant Bank Arena on May 26, 2024 in Sunrise, Fla. Photo by Joel Auerbach /Getty Images
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It’s hard to imagine that anyone wants Stanley Cup hockey running until the end of June, but here we are — face to face with a Cup final schedule that won’t start for another week. If it goes seven games, the NHL season won’t wrap up until June 24, three days before the league’s summertime awards-plus-draft extravaganza starts in Las Vegas.
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The NHL season is going to be long. There’s no getting around it.
But must the season end when it does? Can’t it end in late May, or at worst, in the flowering days of early June?
The simplest answer would be to start the season earlier. At least on paper, anyway.
But as you start to ponder what might be versus what currently is, you realize that the answer is very much a Rubik’s cube. You move one square and you start to see how that affects adjacent squares and sometimes squares that are far afield as well.
It’s hard to find a person who would argue that pre-season, as currently constructed, is something anyone wants.
There was a time where players needed a series of games that don’t count to get themselves ready for the season. But players arrive at the rump of practices we still call training camp in fighting-fit shape.
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They do need to find their game rhythm a bit, but the fitness question just isn’t there anymore.
The only real rationale that remains is on the business side: teams can still charge their season-ticket holders for the two or three home games hosted in pre-season.
But given how teams have cut down on their home pre-season schedules, as well as farming out their pre-season home dates to neutral venues, you can see how even teams are valuing these bonus dates less and less.
In a market like Vancouver, where the team has only played a couple pre-season games at home in recent years, with one or two more played outside Vancouver in places like Abbotsford or Victoria, you can see how easy it would be to tighten up pre-season.
The problem with pre-season lies elsewhere. The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun highlighted earlier this spring how much teams in the southern U.S. would rather not play in September and October at all: they don’t want to compete against high school and college football, which draw massive crowds.
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Additionally, LeBrun notes, both ESPN and TNT are tied heavily into Major League Baseball’s playoffs, which run throughout October.
Surely, though, you could work around that.
The real issue, one surmises is really the back end of the schedule.
In the old days, the NHL’s American rightholders wanted to avoid the May “sweeps” period, where crucial data about the viewing habits of Americans was collected by independent tracking agencies. Generally this month-long period would wrap up the week before Memorial Day and because NHL hockey was never a ratings hit, networks like NBC sought to avoid having Stanley Cup final games, which they were committed to showing, appear in the sample.
That’s not an issue anymore, but simple logic suggests that ABC, the modern network carrier of the cup final, would rather keep the schedule concurrent with the NBA Finals, which ABC also airs. Having the two final series airing on alternate nights to each other creates a tight two-week window for ABC’s scheduling.
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All this adds up to a technocratic answer, but it’s hard to imagine many really want this.
If you started the season in September, you’d be two to three weeks ahead of where we are now. And with viewers less and less tied to the old TV schedule, seeking out their programming — even live sport — on a more bespoke basis, there’s just no real reason for the NHL to go forward like this.
Hockey has carved out a niche for itself in the United States over the past two decades. It may not be as big as the NHL would like, but what’s there is robust.
The league’s leadership should lean in to serving their fans and less to the cautious scheduling whims of their media partners.
pjohnston@postmedia.com
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Courtesy : https://theprovince.com/sports/hockey/nhl/the-stanley-cup-final-schedule-is-set-and-its-ridiculous