The watchability of men’s ice hockey in the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics plummeted without NHL players. Now the league is considering participating in the 2022 Winter Olympics in China.
If the NHL isn’t careful, it’s going to show its hand.
As the league aggressively tries to grow its revenue both at home and abroad, it continues to make decisions that it thinks are good for its bottom dollar, but end up being bad for its on-ice product.
After allowing its players to participate in the previous five Winter Olympics, the NHL pulled its athletes from the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, igniting a firestorm of criticism from fans and the International Olympic Committee alike.
”In South Korea, we felt ultimately there were a lot more negatives than positives than going,” NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said at a SXSW panel on Saturday about the NHL’s efforts to expand internationally…specifically, in China.
Strangely enough, the league seems to feel that whatever negatives existed in South Korea may not apply in China when the country hosts the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.
”There’s a lot of potential NHL fans there, a lot of potential NHL players there,” Daly said at that same panel, referring to China.
Ding ding ding.
The reasons the NHL cited for opting out of the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics included fears the players faced a higher chance of injury and a disinclination to interrupt the schedule.
Funny enough, those same concerns wouldn’t be mitigated by a trip nearly the same distance for nearly the same amount of time to Beijing in four years.
The difference here, plain and simple, is that the NHL didn’t think the Pyeongchang Olympics would line its pockets. It thinks the Beijing Games could.
”Right now China is one of, if not the, hottest markets in the world. Everyone wants to get in there,” David Proper, executive vice president of media and international strategy for the NHL, said at the SXSW panel.
And Daly added that since China is a “new market for hockey,” the NHL has an “obligation to build the base.”
Further international expansion for the NHL has its own set of pros and cons. Obviously, with the grueling schedule of hockey as compared with, say, football, travel for games in markets such as China would prove a logistical nightmare. But the NHL has already entered into an agreement to play two preseason games in China next season.
The NHL has its sights set on expansion, so that’s an issue we, the observers, don’t have much say in.
However, the NHL, and its bank account, are susceptible to fans communicating their displeasure with the league’s players skipping the Olympics.
During the 2018 Games, NBC Sports chairman Mark Lazarus confirmed that NBC’s Olympics ratings were down as a result of NHLers’ absence from the Winter Olympics. And that doesn’t just hurt NBC. NHL viewership as a whole was down — the ratings for every team save for two — during that period, as well, without the Olympics serving as a lead-in.
Now, it’s true that the NHL itself — and, more specifically, its owners — wouldn’t see much financial gain from letting its players compete in the Olympics with no profit-sharing involved.
But the league robbed the United States of a legitimate shot at a gold medal from a team that would have been led by young stars such as Auston Matthews and Jack Eichel and veterans Patrick Kane and Phil Kessel, among others.
In short, it’s a bad look for the league to be talking out of both sides of its mouth, listing off all the problems with sending its players overseas for international competition while actively attempting to grow the league internationally.
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The truth of the matter here is that the NHL didn’t see the value in the South Korean market. It certainly does in China.
But the Olympics, and the desires of its homegrown players to play in them, shouldn’t be a pawn in that bigger-picture moneymaking scheme.