Report: Flyers Will Play Bruins at Fenway

It's not always a bad thing when a television network has too much influence over a sports league's schedule. Sometimes, doing things for the sake of ratings is good.

However, I'm pretty sure most hockey fans would agree it is not a good idea to pander to a television network when that network wants to avoid the two-time Hart Trophy winner. That appears to be what the NHL has done for NBC, and it involves the league's signature regular-season event, the Winter Classic.

A report out of The Daily Times (based in Delaware County, Penn.) says the Philadelphia Flyers have been chosen to play the Boston Bruins on New Year's Day 2010 at Fenway Park.

This is a defensible decision. The two teams aren't terribly far apart, have intense, loyal fanbases, and have played some tough games against one another over the years. There is plenty of tradition associated with each franchise.

However, this decision was not made for any of those reasons. As the Times article points out, it was made to give NBC what they wanted.

Despite springtime reports that the Flyers were out of the running as Boston's foe in the next outdoor game, they recently were brought back into the discussion by NBC, which will broadcast the contest.

The NHL lobbied to pit the Washington Capitals against the Bruins in an effort to showcase Hart Trophy winner Alex Ovechkin and his exciting, young team.

However, sources say NBC trumped that decision, telling the NHL it wanted the Flyers instead of the Caps in order to draw a better television audience and increase advertising revenue.

This is illogical, right? How could the Flyers be more marketable on this stage than a two-time league MVP, widely recognized as one of the faces of the sport?

The answer can be found in the Nielsen ratings from the 2009 playoffs, according to Joe Haggerty.

Surprisingly the 1.4 rating for NBC's Game 1 between the Capitals/Penguins was 18% below the 1.7 that Penguins/Flyers Game 3 drew on the network just two weeks prior in the first round of the 2008-09 postseason.

A single Nielsen point is supposed to equal one percent of TV households, or about 1.15 million. Using that number, some simple math will tell you that NBC chose the Flyers over the Capitals over a difference of around 300,000 viewers. When you think about the fact that there are close to 115,000,000 television households in the country, this is a very petty decision by NBC.

It also stinks for a couple of reasons. For starters, this is an extremely small sample size. Using these ratings to imply that there is more national interest in the Flyers than there is in the Capitals is a terrible misuse of the Nielsen system. However, that appears to be what NBC is doing. After all, when you start fiddling with tenths of percentage points in a national survey, you're asking for trouble.

Second, it shows that the NHL is yielding too much power to a television partner that continues to not pay a rights fee to air the games. While it's very important for the NHL to have an over-the-air partner, they're getting whipped around by NBC, and they get virtually nothing but the exposure in return for it.

Were NBC paying hundreds of millions (or even tens of millions) of dollars for the broadcast rights, one could probably be more understanding of decisions like this one. Instead, we're left to scratch our heads.