from Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing,

There are several key things to consider with ratings stories, including who’s providing the ratings numbers, what those numbers are being compared to, and what other context is out there. The Athletic’s “NHL TV ratings up as push to engage fans outside rinks breaks from tradition,” a story by Sean Shapiro that was published Friday, is missing a fair bit of important context. The piece is about the NHL “television boom,” but it cites a grand total of two national US TV games, one Canadian national game, NHL.tv numbers (not specified, but “doubled”), and season ratings so far on one RSN (Fox Sports Midwest, soon to be Bally Sports Midwest), with all of those numbers provided by league sources.

But while “ratings up” is technically true, there’s a lot more context to be found in a fuller look at the publicly-available ratings, and that can be done without relying on any league sources. And that’s especially important when it comes to the national games on NBC and NBCSN, and their ratings this year are quite important with this being the last year of the NHL on NBC TV contract. To start with, here are some key parts of Shapiro’s piece on the national TV picture, which is what we’re primarily concerned with here.

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