Prior
Registered User
- Jan 18, 2020
- 2,423
- 1,138
The NHL is just insanely stupid when it comes to most of this stuff with the schedule and the times. In a year without fans that'll (hopefully) not happen again, how do you not do a bunch of weird things with the schedule and the broadcasts to get more people to watch? Start games at 4PM (5 Eastern) every day. Stagger them so that you can watch other games during the intermissions. Do whatever you can to make the product more interesting for people who are not able to go.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for an NHL game to begin at 9:30 PM Central time...and I don't want to hear anything about TV or any of that BS. It's a middle finger to the fans. But at the same time none of this is surprising with the NHL, a league that is so incompetent when it comes to marketing itself to potential fans that it starts eight games at the same time and then the next slate of games an hour later so that they all go to intermission at the same time.
Exactly this.
With many people from home and mostly stuck there, there is no reason there shouldn’t be a minute from 5pm-11pm that doesn’t have a live hockey game under most circumstances.
NHL does everything it can to make it more challenging to grow the game. Hell, even in a state where we about as diehard about the game as there is, the team has no ability to sell their product given the starts. Part of that is on the Wild to drive change there though and not be resigned to getting assigned whatever is leftover.