Saturday's Kraken Game Could Be One-Off - Or Vision Of Their TV Future

Seattle Begins Season-Ending Four Game Road Trip With Dallas Matinee

One aspect of Saturday afternoon's Seattle Kraken-Dallas Stars game is extraordinary. Practically unheard of. Rarely if ever experienced by Kraken fans.

The extraordinary part has nothing whatsoever to do with the game itself. It concerns how fans will consume the contest.

Saturday's game at American Airlines Center is free to watch. Not if-you-have-cable "free" to watch. More specifically, not if-you-pay-for-the-sports-tier "free" to watch. Free. If you own a TV, free. 

Turn on ABC - KOMO 4 in Seattle - and 2 1/2 hours of Kraken hockey is yours for the asking.

Here's why this matters. Since before the millennium, virtually all local team sports broadcasts have migrated to regional sports cable networks, or RSNs. In Washington State, that's ROOT Sports. (We'll discuss the exceptions in a moment.)

ROOT Sports has experienced calamitous subscriber defections, from 3.3 million in 2014 to just 1.2 million in 2024, This tracks with the nationwide decline of RSNs. John Stanton, who owns both the MLB Seattle Mariners and the cable channel, provided those numbers to KOMO-TV.

It's reasonable to wonder how much more popular the Kraken could be if their games could get in front of more eyeballs.

Comcast moving ROOT to a pricier tier, which coincided with the beginning of the current NHL season, hasn't helped. At the time, the Kraken released a statement which said in part, "The sports broadcasting landscape is undergoing significant change. We want our games to be available to as many fans as possible."

As many fans as possible, you say?

Given the free-falling RSN numbers, it's reasonable to wonder how much more popular the Kraken could be if their games could get in front of more eyeballs. For a franchise still working to establish a beachhead on the Puget Sound sports landscape, such exposure could well compensate for the loss of subscriber dollars.

The NHL and NBA are currently battling it out in court with Diamond Sports Group, the financially-rickety operator of many U.S. RSNs under the "Bally Sports" branding.

Two NHL teams have already broken from their RSN cable model and gone back to the future - over the air broadcasts on free TV. One of those is the Arizona Coyotes, which we'll leave aside because of their continually in flux situation.

The other is the Vegas Golden Knights. As of February, reported Awful Announcing, "Comscore data reveals that Golden Knights ratings are up 36% this season, which would be the third-largest increase across the league."

The station airing Golden Knights games has naturally extolled the power of a greater potential audience.

“The viewership and engagement we are seeing have grown incredibly and should dispel any doubts about the power of an over-the-air broadcast channel to serve sports fans,” Scripps Sports President Brian Lawlor was quoted by Cord Cutters News. “The Golden Knights wanted to reach more of their fans, and they clearly are.”

Vegas, as defending Stanley Cup champions, can bank on the ratings success which comes from winning. However, their viewership bounce is relevant for Seattle, in that both are recent expansion franchises in non-traditional markets.

So while you enjoy today's Kraken game on channel 4, think about how nice it would be to find whole bunches of games next season on one of Seattle's non-network broadcast stations.