Stanley Cup Final Game 6 TV ratings break local, national records
The television audience for Sunday’s Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final represented a new summit for both national and Nashville demographics.
The Penguins may have won the 2017 Stanley Cup Final on Sunday night in Game 6, but on Monday morning, NBC is doing some celebrating of its own.
The national overnight rating for the broadcast on Sunday night came out to a 4.76, a 28 percent increase on the Penguins’ clincher in San Jose, California in 2016. Continuing on the national rankings, it’s the fourth-highest overnight number for any Stanley Cup Final game on NBC. Additionally, the 4.76 is the highest ever on NBC for a Stanley Cup Final game that didn’t feature the Blackhawks.
While that’s certainly good news for NBC, especially given how poorly the product performed in years prior, the local ratings turned out to be exactly as expected in both markets.
PIT-NSH Game 6 on NBC was the highest-rated @PredsNHL game EVER in the Nashville market, delivering a 28.3 rating
— NBC Sports PR (@NBCSportsPR) June 12, 2017
The fact that this broadcast is now the best-ever Predators game in the Nashville market is unremarkable. It would have been much more newsworthy if the broadcast hadn’t performed this well, given the fact that it was the closest the franchise has ever come to winning a Stanley Cup.
In Pittsburgh, which is preparing for its second parade in two years, the broadcast produced a 40.0 local rating. That’s the second-highest overnight rating for a Penguins game in Pittsburgh, lagging only behind the Penguins’ Stanley Cup Final clincher in 2009. That game earned a 42.2.
Thus far, NBC hasn’t released any information about its streaming audience for Game 6. It will be interesting to compare the streaming audiences year-over-year and see if the trends of sports fans who prefer to watch live sports on set-top or mobile devices growing continue.
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It seems the NHL’s lack of parity as far as winning championships in recent years (last nine Stanley Cups have been shared among only four different teams) hasn’t hurt its television ratings, yet. If the on-ice results continue to go that way, it may eventually affect the television ratings.