The Stanley Cup, on display at the Hockey Hall of Fame, is awarded to the league champion. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The National Hockey League season began with a lockout. It is ending with a match up that has fans of the Original Six teams salivating.
The Chicago Blackhawks clinched a place in the 2013 Stanley Cup Finals Saturday night, with a nail-biting 4-3 victory over the Los Angeles Kings in double overtime that gave them the Western Division championship. The Blackhawks go on to play the Boston Bruins, who grapped their spot on Friday night, defeating the Pittsburgh Penguins four straight to take the Eastern Division title.
Both teams followed tradition: they didn’t touch their divisional trophies, on the belief that caressing the reward can wait for the Stanley Cup.
Truly, Boston and Chicago fans are levitating over the match up. The game will be emotionally significant in Boston, which is still reeling from the impact of the bombings at the Boston Marathon. Indeed, the Bruins have wrapped their arms around marathon victims, featuring a Boston Strong flag at every game, and awarding a game jacket after each contest.
Chicagoans, meanwhile, are excited at the chance to reclaim the Cup, three years after their victory in 2010. It is the first time the two teams have met in the Stanley Cup final, and the first time any two members of the NHL’s Original Six have been in the final since 1979.
But, will that be enough to generate excitement outside the Windy City and the Hub? Canada’s satirical weekly television show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, raised doubts on Sunday morning.
The show tweeted, “#StanleyCup final an original-6 showdown between the red-hot Bruins and the Chicago… never mind, you’re not gonna watch.”
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, home to Hockey Night In Canada, certainly has to hope they’re wrong. And, so does NBC Sports, which has promoted hockey in an unprecedented way this season.
Ratings for last year’s Stanley Cup final between the Los Angeles Kings and New Jersey Devils hit a five-year low in 2012, according to SB Nation. The telecasts averaged about three million people over the six game series, down 33 percent from 2011, and the worst since 2007, a series that featured the Ottawa Senators and Anaheim Ducks.
The peak rating over the last five years was the Philadelphia-Chicago match in 2010, with five million viewers. That bodes well for this year’s Stanley Cup final, since Chicagoans are back in it, and Bostonians are hockey mad. Jim Donaldson, writing in the Providence Journal, says the Cup telecasts are “must see TV” in Boston.
“The Greatest Show on Ice — coming soon to a television screen near you, the final scenes of a stirring script with storylines worthy of the big screen, a Hollywood epic if ever there was one,” he says of the Bruins’ games.
Preliminary results via TV By The Numbers show Saturday night’s game averaged 3.3 million viewers for NBC, beating Fox’s Major League Baseball telecast and ABC”s IndyCar broadcast (although not scoring as well as CBS’s offerings). That’s better than the average for the 2012 Stanley Cup series, and if that pattern holds, NBC will be crowing about hockey ratings’ rebound before the players are kissing the Cup.
