Game 1 watched in just 523,000 U.S. households

Fact 1: Versus is available to 72 million homes.

Fact 2: The first game of the 2007 Stanley Cup finals on Versus was watched by 523.000 households.

Fact 3: The first game of the NBA eastern conference finals between the Pistons and the Cavs on ABC has been watched in 2,9 million households.

Fact 4: The NBA is panicking that the ratings are down from last year.

Fact 5: Garry Bettman will tell you that nothing's wrong with the NHL.

What does that tell you?


And again people in Canada will start complaining that Garry Bettman is an idiot and nobody in the U.S. cares about the NHL. Do you really think that a guy in Miami or Chicago is interested in the Stanley cup finals featuring a small market team like Anaheim and a bunch of angry dudes with no teeth from Canada? Of course not.

C'mon, California and Florida combined have 5 NHL teams, Canada just 6, and hockey is a religion in Canada. Bettman should finally realize that there's just no way that he's gonna make people in let's say Atlanta watch the NHL. People in Atlanta wanna watch the Falcons and maybe the Braves and that's it. Same goes for the Predators, Hurricanes and the Coyotes. There's just no way that an NHL team located in a small market, or a city where football rules (which is pretty much every city in the U.S. at this point). Would the league have worse ratings if the Predators were in Winnipeg? Quite frankly I don't know, all I know is that the league can't afford to lose any more viewers and maybe it's time to take a gamble and move some teams back to Canada. At least there the arenas will be full, even if the team isn't exactly a cup contender.

The fact is that the NHL isn't gonna get better ratings by pushing Crosby as the "next great one", they should just move some teams back to Canada where people care about hockey.