Should the NHL go to Russia in 2014?

Author: Scott Taylor

March 29, 2010

Scott Taylor's E-Take is sponsored by BioTech Laser, who utilize a low intensity laser that stimulates the natural healing of tissue.

This will be the toughest decision the National Hockey League will ever have to make (well, this and determining the exact time when Gary Bettman’s Sunbelt Experiment has officially failed).

Should the NHL go to Sochi, Russia for the 2014 Olympics or should it stay home?  The tiny perfect commissioner has yet to make a decision but if you listen closely to him, he’s leaning against the NHL’s participation.  While many of the players, especially the Russian-born players, say they’re going to the Games with or without the NHL’s permission, the league itself is unsure.  And from a business perspective, that’s probably a good way to be at this stage.

Let’s not kid ourselves, an Olympic hockey tournament in Russia in four years will not bear the fruits of an Olympic hockey tournament in Vancouver.  Almost every pundit today believes the NHL must remain part of the Olympic family simply because the Vancouver tournament was so wonderful, but will the Winter Olympics in Sochi, eight full hours ahead of our Eastern time zone, be as spectacular?

It was great when all those Olympic hockey games were on television or your computer at 6 p.m.  But what will it mean when the games are available at 3 a.m.?  Will people really care?  Not many North American hockey fans remember what happened in Turin.

The Vancouver Olympics were, first and foremost, Canada’s Olympics.  On a secondary basis, they were North America’s Olympics.  We loved those Games, especially the hockey tournament, but if you spent any time reading the British press you’d believe that there was probably no Games worse than these Vancouver Games in the history of the Modern Olympics.  The Brits complained about everything and in the end, much of Europe thought we were a giant collection of incompetent boobs.

As far as hockey was concerned, the tournament played marvelously in Canada.  Almost every Canadian watched the gold medal game.  The numbers were remarkably good in the United States, too, but in non-traditional markets, there wasn’t a lot of time spent watching the Olympics.  The 2010 Olympic hockey tournament preached to the converted.  But in the United States, you find this interesting.  It’s from tvbythenumbers.com, the best ratings website I’ve ever found and was published shortly after the Games ended:

“All three American Idol telecasts trounced Vancouver Olympics coverage, dominating across Adults 18-49, Adults 18-34, Teens and virtually all key demos.  In fact, with eight hours of head-to-head competition over the past two weeks, American Idol outperformed the Vancouver Games by +55 per cent among Adults 18-49, +87 per cent among Adults 18-34, +99 per cent among Teens and +6 per cent in Total Viewers.”

While we here in Canada thought the Vancouver Games was the absolute bomb, Americans also loved the Games (in total there were 190 million viewers over 17 days), but they didn’t love them enough to have them win every time slot or dominate in every demographic like they did here in Canada.

To be fair, the gold medal hockey game drew the largest number of viewers for any hockey game in U.S. history (52.9 million), but it certainly helped that it was Canada vs. the United States at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday.  You can bet that if the USA had not been in the final and that if the final took place at, say, midnight on a Sunday night, that number would have been miniscule.

And that’s the kind of thing that worries NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. If he’s going to shut down his season for 14 days in February, he’d better get something in return and while it was clear he’d get something back in Vancouver, it’s not so clear that Sochi will be worth the effort.

Bettman knows that the Olympics needs the NHL more than the NHL needs the Olympics and with that in his pocket, the little commissioner needs to meet with the IOC and make some demands.  He needs to guarantee that the games are played at 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning so that they start at 6 or 7 p.m. in the Eastern Time Zone.  He needs to shorten the tournament so that the league isn’t shut down for two weeks.  He needs to have the IOC dump four teams, make it an elite eight-team event and get it over in a week.  Play round-robin games on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, play the semi-final game on Friday, the bronze medal game on Saturday and the gold medal game on Sunday and start the season again on the following Tuesday.

Baseball is no longer in the Games because the Major Leagues would not go in the summer.  Baseball has never been more popular in the U.S.

Soccer doesn’t send its best to the Olympics (FIFA sends, essentially, junior teams), but the IOC won’t mess with FIFA.

Basketball is still in the Games because the NBA takes its winter game and goes to the Olympics in the summer.  If you could move Olympic hockey to the Summer Games (why not?) then a relationship between the NHL and the IOC would be perfect.  As it is now, will spending 14 days in Sochi, Russia, be worth shutting down the league for 14 days?

Since the 2010 Games ended, attendance is down in Colorado, Tampa, Florida, Atlanta and Long Island (if you actually believe announced NHL attendances), so the tournament didn’t help the NHL all that much outside of Canada.

So should the NHL go to Sochi in 2014?  Not without some guarantees.

However, if Bettman can negotiate those guarantees, Sochi might be worth exploring.

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