The Vegas Golden Knights swept the Presidents’ Trophy winner in four games and are sitting in their third Stanley Cup Final in nine years. The Carolina Hurricanes closed out the Canadiens in five games and are joining them. The NHL has its best nightmare: a Hurricanes-Golden Knights Final on ABC, broadcast television, prime time, the whole infrastructure of mainstream American sports attention pointed at two cities that didn’t have professional hockey within living memory of most of their residents.
The league will handle this the way a theater director handles a production where the two leads weren’t in the original casting vision. The sets are built, the sponsors are locked in, the promotional materials are ready to go — and now the director has to go out and sell the show with the cast he actually has. He’ll do it competently. He’ll call them magnificent. He’ll mean it, mostly. He’ll tell the press this is exactly the story he wanted to tell. And behind the curtain, in the green room where the original casting call still lives, there will be a very quiet conversation about the box office.
The box office, in this analogy, is the TV ratings. The 2023 Stanley Cup Final — Vegas against Florida — averaged 1.3 rating and 2.6 million viewers; a 43-percent drop from the prior year, the least-watched Final since 2007 outside the COVID anomaly. The 2025 Final, Panthers against Oilers on cable, averaged 2.5 million viewers — down 40 percent from 2024. The league’s own 4 Nations tournament, a mid-February exhibition, outrated its championship series. The director has been doing a lot of talking to the press.
Gary Bettman, who is very good at this particular kind of talking, prefers the word “footprint” to “market.” He said in 2023: “It’s more about the footprint: You do better in terms of interest at all levels of the game where you have franchises.” He’s also fond of noting that five of the last six Stanley Cup champions came from non-traditional markets. Both of these things are technically true; neither of them explains why the Winter Classic drew 920,000 viewers in 2025, the worst figure in the event’s 17-year history, down from a 3-million-plus average during the years Bettman was building his footprint.
This is not a column about whether Carolina and Vegas deserve to be here. They do, plainly. The Hurricanes have made the playoffs in eight consecutive seasons under Rod Brind’Amour; they have a sellout streak exceeding 150 consecutive home games at Lenovo Center; they went 11-1 in these playoffs, with Andersen posting a .950 save percentage and a 1.12 GAA through the first two rounds. The organization that nine years ago averaged 11,776 fans per game now averages 19,526. Nobody watching the Hurricanes on a national level has been a choice, not a verdict. The market has not been indifferent; the national media apparatus has been.
Vegas is, if anything, the more remarkable story. The franchise played its first home game nine days after the Route 91 shooting killed 60 people and wounded 413 more; the “Vegas Strong” identity wasn’t manufactured by a marketing department, it was built under conditions of actual grief. Nevada youth hockey participation has grown 171 percent since the team arrived. They are, demonstrably, a real hockey market. John Tortorella, hired as head coach two months ago, is currently preparing to manage a Stanley Cup Final.
And yet: Mitch Marner leads these playoffs in scoring with 21 points in 16 games. He plays for Vegas. He plays in DMA market rank 40. The league has finally developed a star who can carry a playoff run the way the NBA’s stars carry theirs — and he’s doing it from the 40th-largest television market in the country. Nineteen NHL agents have formally complained to the league about its player marketing approach. Zayne Parekh, one of the sport’s brightest young players, said publicly that NHL players are “robots” without personality. The NHL markets maybe five players nationally, and two of them are on the wrong side of 35.
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Sports media reporter Mark J. Burns noted in February 2025 that the NHL’s double-digit viewership decline generated roughly no institutional attention, while comparable NBA numbers would have produced weeks of coverage. This is either a sign that hockey occupies a comfortable niche and the decline doesn’t matter, or it’s a sign that nobody expects anything different. The league is charging a $2 billion expansion fee and has Atlanta and Houston on the candidate list. The footprint is expanding. Rod Brind’Amour getting Carolina here — the first coach in NHL history to win at least one playoff round in each of his first seven seasons, who was captain of the 2006 Cup team and could become the first person in the expansion era to reach the Final as both — is apparently not enough of a story to fix the underlying attention problem.
Two teams built to win are in the Final. The game will be excellent. The box office will be what it’s going to be, and the director will explain that what’s more important is whether the game is exciting, entertaining, and compelling. He has a point. It’s just that he has been making it for a while now, and the numbers keep doing the thing that numbers do.
