Irish Blues said:
I don't think the Islanders and Devils ever got fantastic ratings to begin with anyway, plus you have to consider that OLN doesn't reach nearly as many households as ESPN. I'm curious how TV ratings are for the other teams around the country - if they are similarly down across the board as well.
Isles and Devils television rights are owned by Cablevision and they go all out to restrict coverage to sell their own team and pay huge money
(300m Isles until 2030/12-15m per year Devils for about twenty years)
for that priviledge. Also FSN simply has no hockey programming beyond the game and do not even stick around long enough to cover the coaches press conferences after games like they did before the lockout and do no special programming. Until this year for close to seven years there was not a single Isles-Devils preseason game on television and of course that game was only to feature James Dolan's team.
On TWC if the games are on FSN-2/MSG-2 the game (Islander, Ranger or Devil) is not even listed in the television guide before that Dolan's disasterous Metro channel
was not available locally and fans of all three teams would be shut-out when games played on that network.
Msg practically spams Knicks/Rangers now that they lost baseball to a point WFAN was killing them yesterday more than they could talk about Messier or show his press conference live (which is a shame) and still with a winning team their ratings are down on their own network.
To give an example of how far things have fallen Rangers 2005-06 number for television on Msg is lower than Sportschannel's Islander television ratings now when Howard Milstein owned the team in the mid-90's.
Bottom line, baseball's enormous here and it killed the hockey media market, Dolan helped that by failing to market all three teams he owns and in the end he hurt his own product (and the New York Hockey ratings) by doing so, IMO.
