Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Watching Game 1 Of The Stanley Cup Final

06/29/2021 at 8:34pm EDT

from Bill Shea of The Athletic,

NBC’s National Hockey League and Stanley Cup swan song began on Monday.

The Tampa Bay Lightning’s title defense began with a 5-1 thumping of the visiting Montreal Canadiens, which is making its first finals appearance since winning an NHL-record 24th championship in 1993.

NBC said the game averaged 1.66 million combined viewers on its NBCSN cable channel and Peacock streaming audience. That makes it the least-watched Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final since 2007, per historic data from Sports Media Watch. The 2007 Senators-Ducks opener averaged 769,000 on Versus (remember Versus? That was NBCSN’s name from 2006-11).

Last year, when the pandemic forced the delayed NHL playoffs into so-called bubbles in Edmonton and Toronto, the Lightning-Dallas Stars Game 1 aired on NBC and it averaged 2.16 million total viewers.

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he Bruins come-from-behind 4-2 victory over the Blues at TD Garden in Boston, Mass., averaged 5.380 million viewers across NBC, NBCSports.com and the NBC Sports app (8:09-11:01 p.m. ET), up 2% vs. last year’s Game 1 (WSH-VGK, 5.288 million) and up 9% vs. 2017 (NSH-PIT, 4.925 million). It trails only two other Game 1s in NBC Sports’ 14-year history broadcasting the Stanley Cup Final (BOS-CHI, 6.315 million, 2013; CHI-TBL, 5.586 million, 2015).

Game 1 is expected to propel NBC to win Monday night in total viewers, and the key Adult 18-49 and Adult 25-54 demographics. The game delivered a 2.87 HH rating and 5.264 million TV-only viewers.

Digitally, Blues-Bruins delivered the most-streamed Stanley Cup Final Game 1 ever and the fourth-most streamed NHL game on record, with an Average Minute Audience (AMA) of 115,500 viewers and 19.9 million live minutes, up 37% and 24%, respectively, vs. 2018.

St. Louis led all markets with a 29.0 local rating, NBC Sports’ highest NHL rating on record in the market. Boston scored a 25.2 rating. NBC was the No. 1 network in both markets during the game.

Following are the Top 5 markets for Blues-Bruins Stanley Cup Final Game 1 on NBC:

RankMarketRating
1 St. Louis 29.0
2 Boston 25.2
3 Providence 18.8
4 Buffalo 8.4
5 Kansas City 5.2

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

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