RALEIGH — The NHL’s postseason viewership heater is poised to hit another crescendo with the Stanley Cup Final, beginning Tuesday with the Golden Knights and Hurricanes.
The prior two months of the league playoffs have already seen a run of audience increases reaching historic levels. The first round averaged 1.8 million viewers, up 68% from 2025. The second round averaged 1.9 million viewers, soaring 55% from a year ago, and setting a league record.
The conference finals, meanwhile, showed a similar trend as ESPN coverage of the Golden Knights and Avalanche averaged 2.2 million viewers, up 44% from a year ago and the best such figure since 2015. TNT Sports, meanwhile, averaged 2 million for the first four games of the Eastern Conference Final between the Hurricanes and Canadiens, up 49% from 2025.
The audience trend is set to accelerate in the Stanley Cup Final for several key reasons:
- It’s Disney’s turn to air the event this year in an annual rotation with Warner Bros. Discovery-controlled TNT Sports that began in 2021. ABC will be a central component of this year’s coverage, and that broadcast element will lead to significantly greater television reach than the odd-numbered years in which TNT Sports airs the Stanley Cup Final.
- There are two U.S.-based markets involved for the first time since the 2023 Stanley Cup Final between the Golden Knights and Panthers. While the Stanley Cup Final is undoubtedly a national and international event, home-market viewership is a critical component of the overall figure, and the presence of the Oilers the last two years meant there was a non-Nielsen-rated market in the matchup.
- Enhanced metrics by Nielsen. This will be the first Stanley Cup Final since the introduction last September of the measurement agency’s Big Data + Panel process. The NHL has been among many sports beneficiaries of the expanded tabulation as live content has become even more critical across the TV business.
Last year’s Stanley Cup Final between the Panthers and Oilers, a six-game series win for Florida, averaged 2.5 million viewers, down 40% from 2024, in part because of the cable-based presentation on TNT Sports.
The 2024 matchup, the first of two straight between the Panthers and Oilers, aired on ABC and averaged 4.17 million viewers, and that could be a much closer comparison to this year. The number from two years ago, however, was somewhat skewed by a massive audience average of 7.7 million viewers for the event’s first Game 7 since 2019.
Basketball Interplay
The next week in particular will feature a heady run of nightly primetime programming for ABC in which the first three games of the Stanley Cup Final will air on the networks on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. That will pair with the first two games of the NBA Finals between the Knicks and Spurs on Wednesday and Friday.
There will be a shared day off of the two high-profile events on Sunday, and then the programming back-and-forth picks back up Monday, with the two series likely feeding off each other.
Similar viewership trends, meanwhile, have also unfolded in Canada, both on the English-based Sportsnet and CBC and the French-language TVA Sports. With U.S. and Canadian viewership combined, the first two rounds of the NHL playoffs averaged 3.3 million viewers, the most-watched figure of that type on record, and beating the prior high set two years ago by 24%.
