Last night in the NBA the Cleveland Cavaliers won their first championship and were led by their home grown megastar Lebron James. Unless you completely took yourself away from everything media related you heard about the series that pitted the best potential season of all time versus the forever downtrodden city of Cleveland led by the game's biggest star.
People certainly made an effort to tune in.
*Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final drew approximately six million viewers in comparison*
The NBA is easily marketed. They understand what their product is. It is meant to please their consumer. They sell their stars and they more importantly allow them to deliver. It is a very simple concept that creates quality entertainment. It makes for a great product that is enjoyed by many.
The NHL does not get this. They go out of their way to create game conditions that bog down their best and most interesting players. Hockey culture goes out of its way to try and suppress the personality and uniqueness of its players. The whole "act like you've been there before" mantra is very real and runs deep in the sport. If a player exhibits personality it is frowned upon. Almost all player interaction is vanilla by design. Alexander Ovechkin was famously eviscerated for celebrating a goal with a "flaming stick". The lesson learned was don't you dare have any fun.
Watching intermission during an NHL broadcast on NBC you would be hard pressed to know who the game's great players are. The NHL broadcast goes out of its way to criticize the truly great players and prop up the dime a dozen shot blocker. The ABC basketball broadcast treats their best players as the assets they are. They talk highly about them and only reserve criticism for those players when it is truly merited. You also learn from an NBA broadcast from a guy like Jeff Van Gundy. He uses his past coaching experience to give useful insights and helps educate the casual fan on what meaningful things are going on. NBC has a guy who hates advanced stats and litters the viewer with useless jeopardy factoids about where the players used to play which nobody gives a damn about. The NHL guy doesn't even grasp the simplest concepts about the sport he has devoted his life to. You don't learn anything useful from an NBC NHL broadcast. In fact I would argue that somebody taking the NBC product serious would know less about the sport than if they had the broadcast on mute.
In Canada Sportsnet seems to think their low ratings are because of their host and not the archaic panel that brings nothing to the table. Both NBC and Sportsnet seem to think that hiring unskilled former players will give viewers a better look into the game. What the viewers actually get is wrong information and baseless platitudes passed off as fact. The people that are supposed to educate the viewer, especially the casual one, fail on all levels. They have a perception of the sport that just isn't accurate. Hockey ruins their own product intentionally because of the death grip they still have on yesteryear. The sport refuses to evolve.
I can't pretend to understand all the rules of basketball because I'm not a huge fan and I have never dedicated a lot of time to the sport. I do know that the way they call the game allows their best players to do cool things that people want to watch. I know that power plays are at an all time low in the NHL and that scoring is also bottoming out.
I know that I continue to see dirty hits in the game because nobody is scared of being disciplined. I know that the league doesn't care about the players well being at all based on the emails that were made available to the public. I know that if you buy a ticket to an NHL game it is a coin flip on if you will see a great player do a great thing on that given night. If you buy a ticket to see Lebron James or Steph Curry you are pretty much guaranteed to see great things no matter what night of the year it is.
Hockey will never be at the same level as basketball in the United States because of the inherent socio-economic issues that are involved. That dynamic is real and hockey will never be one of the most popular sports in the country. Every single school in American has a gym with a hoop. It isn't a reality to have rinks that widespread. That being said the gap shouldn't be as large as it is and most of it has been self inflicted by the higher ups who control the NHL product.
The NBA gets it. People are enjoying their product as much as they ever were. Could hockey at least pretend to try and emulate that? Don't hold your breath.
Thanks for reading!
Pittsburgh Penguins Blogger • 
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