The NHL bounced back from lower viewership last season for its best regular-season average since the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season.

The NHL bounced back from lower viewership last season for its best regular-season average since the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season. All games across ESPN, ABC and TNT/truTV averaged 546,000 viewers, which is the best mark since NBC and NBCSN averaged 590,000 viewers over just 70 games 14 seasons ago.

This season was easily the best for the NHL under its rights deals with ESPN and TNT Sports, with viewership up 23% from last season.

Even taking better audience measurement from Nielsen’s Big Data into account, more people tuned into the NHL this year. Games across ESPN and ABC were up 30% this season (54 telecasts), as the company had its best audience since coming back as an NHL partner prior to the 2021-22 season, averaging 760,000 viewers. ESPN games averaged 602,000 viewers (38 games), which is up 48% from last season. ABC games averaged 1.1 million over 16 telecasts — up 33% for the broadcast TV network’s best average under the existing rights deal.

TNT Sports also had its best season yet as an NHL partner, averaging 381,000 viewers over 72 games (includes truTV simulcasts). That’s up 21% from last season. TNT also had its best Sunday package of games yet (713,000 viewers). Following the Olympics, TNT’s NHL games averaged 453,0000 viewers, which is 47% better than what the network averaged after last season’s 4 Nations Face-Off. It was TNT’s best second half of the season yet.

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Best of the best

The Lightning-Bruins Stadium Series game on Feb. 1 on ESPN was the best NHL audience this season at 2.07 million viewers, which also was the best regular-season game ever on cable TV. ABC’s best game was Red Wings-Penguins on Jan. 3 (1.59 million).

TNT had three of the five best cable TV games this season, led by Bruins-Flyers on March 5 at 1.2 million views. That marks TNT’s best non-Winter Classic regular-season audience yet.

The Bruins all teams with five games in the top 10, followed by the Red Wings (four) and Rangers (three). There were no Capitals games in the top 10.

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