East Coast Bias.

Here was an interesting blog by Kat Kealy, so more her post really hits home. As a college hockey fan of a western college hockey team I can agree with her, how many times have we had to watch yet another game between two east coast teams, or better yet; last season CSTV should have been called the CCHA network because they loved showing the CCHA games on a weekly basis.

As for CBC why do they call it hockey night in Canada? They should call it hockey night in Toronto, every Saturday you get to see the mediocre Maple Leafs lose yet another game in prime time on CBC.

US National Television Extending the East Coast Bias
Kat Kealy
Since I grew up in the northeast, I must admit that I never cared about the sports world being so biased towards the east coast… until I moved to California. Then, I realized that although some sports definitely alter their schedules a bit for the east coast (Monday Night Football would clearly not be as late if they only cared about the east coast viewers), most things in sports are centered on the east coast. Whenever I see a game time, I automatically subtract 3 hours. It’s just the way things go out here.

Clearly, when the national broadcast schedules were released for hockey, I knew there would be more games with east coast teams than west coast teams, but the bottom 10 for US nationally televised games (all with zero or one game) has only two teams from the eastern conference and the top 10 for US nationally televised games (with 5-9 games) has only 3 western conference teams.

Calgary, Edmonton, and Los Angeles have no games that are nationally televised in the US. Clearly, Calgary and Edmonton have a lot of games that will be on CBC and TSN. The Kings have three games that will be nationally televised in Canada and none in the US. I certainly wouldn’t argue that the Kings deserve more air time than they’re getting. They were just barely the 29th team in the league last season. However, using that same argument, why is Tampa Bay going to be on national television in the US 4 times?

I understand that the big hockey markets (like New York, Boston, Minnesota, Detroit, etc.) come first. However, how can the NHL grow the sport in other markets if they only show teams from the cities where they already have good ratings?