from Kevin McGuire of The Comeback,

Opening up against the NFL and the baseball postseason immediately puts the NHL’s regular season hiding deep in the shadows and will ensure it easily gets overlooked. Maybe the NHL has accepted its fate in the pecking order of sports. If so, then that is unsettling as the league tries to expand and grow its product. Maybe the fault falls on the teams, and perhaps it varies by market, but once again the start of the NHL season has seemed to get underway with all of the sports attention focused elsewhere. That even includes preseason basketball as the NBA continues to improve its push to promote its product. The NHL’s loss has long been the NBA’s gain. People tune in to summer league NBA games and will be more likely to discuss what’s happening in a preseason game before they even think about what happened in an NHL regular season game few knew was being played.

As a casual hockey fan myself, I generally do not tune in much to the NHL until after the college football bowl season and the NFL playoffs.

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