While the first five games of the Stanley Cup Final have certainly delivered on the ice, they haven’t delivered the audiences the NHL would have hoped for.
Saturday’s Game 5 between the Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers averaged 2.7 million viewers across TNT and truTV, per Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports. That figure is virtually even with Game 5 viewership the last time TNT aired the Stanley Cup Final, when the Vegas Golden Knights blew out the Panthers to clinch the series in 2023 (2.72 million viewers). Compared to last season, when the Stanley Cup Final aired on ABC, viewership was down 35% (4.15 million viewers).
The discrepancy in cable versus broadcast viewership goes to show just how important the reach of a network like ABC can be for a league like the NHL. The league is sacrificing upwards of a million viewers per game simply because of its deal to air the Stanley Cup Final on TNT every other year.
And to nobody’s surprise given the well-documented decline of cable, Saturday’s game was the least-watched Stanley Cup Final Game 5 since 1994, per Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch. It’s only the second Game 5 to air on cable since that time, with 2023 being the only other example.
Game 5 even found itself down substantially when including Canadian viewership. Per Lewis, the game averaged 7.01 million across the United States and Canada, down 18% versus last year (8.5 million viewers).
Luckily for the NHL, there’s just one more year in which TNT will have the rights to the Stanley Cup Final: 2027. ABC will air the series in 2026 and 2028, the final year of the league’s current American media rights agreements. At that point, it’s hard to imagine the league would willingly opt into more Stanley Cup Finals exclusive to cable. So far, that experiment hasn’t ended well.