Mixed Bag for NHL Bean Counters

Tripp Mickle of Sports Business Journal (subscription required) takes a look at the NHL's attendance and television ratings for the 2006-07 season and finds some good news and some not so good news. As the SBJ points out, the League had

its second [consecutive] regular-season attendance record, but the league's success in arenas was offset by mixed results on TV, where regional ratings fell and national ratings remained relatively flat.

But even the good news isn't as great as it sounds for many of the franchises in the League. While the League set an attendance record for the second consecutive season, it was only a 0.1 percent rise (to 16,954 per game), bolstered by a 10% growth in attendance for the Carolina Hurricanes and Buffalo Sabres. Those gains balance out a nearly-12% loss on St. Louis and a 9 percent loss in Boston, and 13 of the League's 30 teams actually saw a decline in attendance from the 2005-06 season.

Perhaps more troubling for the League were the television numbers:

Regionally, the league saw ratings fall for 11 of the 24 U.S. teams and remain flat for nine others. Some of its biggest drops occurred in markets known as hockey havens. Detroit, which clinched the Western Conference, finished with a 3.5 regional television rating on FSN Detroit, down 25 percent from last season and 42 percent from 2003-04. The Boston Bruins, who finished six points out of the playoffs, averaged a 1.6 rating on NESN, a 24 percent drop from 2005-06 and a 33 percent drop from 2003-04. The league's best RSN results came in small markets, Buffalo and Pittsburgh, which averaged a 5.2 regional rating.

Then, of course, there's the (U.S.) national television ratings, where NBC's coverage was actually down 4.1 percent through April 1. On cable, Versus increased it's total viewers 31%, but finished with the same woeful 0.2 cable rating it had the season before.

North of the border, there's both good and bad news as well, as

CBC's "Hockey Night in Canada" saw 1.439 million households tune in to its 7 p.m. broadcast, a 4 percent rise, but only 766,000 households watched the late game, a 20 percent drop. TSN averaged 425,000 households, down 12 percent from last season but up 24 percent from 2003-04, the season before the lockout.

So the League on the whole, is doing well at the gates (though individual franchises are having trouble selling losing products), and is struggling to get viewers to watch on television. Nowhere to go but up, right? Right?