It is increasingly clear that the NHL Stadium Series has taken over as the premiere NHL outdoor game, at least in the television ratings.<\/p>\n
Sunday\u2019s Bruins-Lightning NHL Stadium Series game averaged 2.1 million viewers on ESPN, marking the largest NHL regular season audience since the 2019 Winter Classic (Blackhawks-Bruins: 2.97M) and the top NHL regular season audience ever on cable. The previous high for a game on cable was 1.8 million for the 2023 Penguins-Bruins Winter Classic on TNT.<\/p>\n
Keep in mind that Nielsen did not begin tracking out-of-home viewership in its estimates until 2020 and did not do so in 100 percent of markets until a year ago. In addition, Nielsen in September shifted to a new metric that combines its traditional panel with \u201cBig Data\u201d from smart TVs and set-top boxes. Those changes will generally skew comparisons to prior years.<\/p>\n
Tampa Bay\u2019s comeback win, which peaked with 2.4 million viewers, increased 30% from last year\u2019s Red Wings-Blue Jackets Stadium Series game (1.6M). It also more-than-doubled the January 2 Rangers-Panthers Winter Classic on TNT Sports.<\/p>\n
The Stadium Series would seem to have definitively surpassed the Winter Classic as the premiere outdoor NHL event. Over the past three seasons, the four Stadium Series games on ESPN\/ABC have outdrawn all three of the Winter Classic games on TNT Sports. And since the current NHL media rights deals began in the 2021-22 season, the Stadium Series accounts for five of the seven most-watched outdoor games.<\/p>\n
In a rarity, the Stadium Series was Sunday\u2019s most-watched sporting event on ESPN\/ABC \u2014 and, as might go without saying, built on its lead-in from Bucks-Celtics (1.5M). The game actually outdrew all of the NBA windows on ESPN\/ABC over the weekend, including ABC\u2019s \u201cNBA Saturday Primetime\u201d matchup (1.9M), though it almost certainly lost its head-to-head matchup with NBC\u2019s \u201cSunday Night Basketball\u201d premiere. Figures for those telecasts will be reported Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere over the weekend, ABC averaged 1.4 million viewers for Rangers-Penguins and 1.2 million for Avalanche-Red Wings on Saturday \u2014 up sharply from last year\u2019s doubleheader of Rangers-Bruins (1.06M) and Blackhawks-Panthers (723K).<\/p>\n
The weekend games were the last on ESPN\/ABC before the NHL takes its Olympic break. The networks are averaging 795,000 viewers for NHL games so far this season, up 39% from last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is increasingly clear that the NHL Stadium Series has taken over as the premiere NHL outdoor game,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444539,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5105],"tags":[2714,54126,5,189,54127,37735,4,4459,2722,54128,2723,37736,54129,540,92,5168,5167],"class_list":["post-444538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa-bay-lightning","tag-avalanche-tv-ratings","tag-bruins-tv-ratings","tag-hockey","tag-lightning","tag-lightning-tv-ratings","tag-new-york-rangers-ratings","tag-nhl","tag-nhl-on-abc","tag-nhl-on-espn","tag-nhl-outdoor-ratings","tag-nhl-ratings","tag-penguins-tv-ratings","tag-red-wings-tv-ratings","tag-tampa-bay","tag-tampa-bay-lightning","tag-tampabay","tag-tampabaylightning"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116010462744519041","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}