Public estimates of hockey viewership – television and/or streaming – are not as accurate as we’d like.
In a recent post, we shared those public reports of viewership of the NHL Stadium Series game in Tampa Bay, featuring the Boston Bruins against the hometown Lightning, we noted a total viewership number of just under 1 million people.
However, more recently, in their early February post, ESPN included the headline that the “2026 NHL Stadium Series delivered most-viewed NHL regular season game ever on cable”. The article then reported an average of 2.1 million viewers of the game on ESPN, the highest audience for a non-playoff NHL game since 2019’s Winter Classic.
This phenomenon is not new to sport and media reports. Often, different numbers are reported from different sources and often, which may have been the case here, the linear/cable television numbers are reported first without the streaming estimates, which increasingly create increases in total viewership. And, always worth noting, these are estimates. So, a reminder to take anyone’s estimates with a grain of salt.
Joe Nicholson photo of 2024 Winter ClassicThe good news, though, is the NHL numbers for the Stadium Series were notable.
Norm O’Reilly is the dean of the University of New England’s College of Business and Partner with the T1 Agency. Rick Burton is the David B. Falk Emeritus Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University and co-host of The NIL Clubhouse on Spotify and Apple. They are co-authors of Business the NHL Way, published by the University of Toronto Press.