All he does is offer suggestions for why ratings might be bad. The Canucks got off to a bad start(so 20% of people stopped watching them?), McDavid got hurt(but he played in half the games during the relevant time frame, shouldn't that balance it out?) and for Sunday nights....well, he didn't offer any explanation there. Again, ratings seem to be down regardless.
For instance:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/hockey/stanley-cup-ratings-dip-in-canada-while-soaring-in-us/article24992609/
But while it was the most-watched game of the Stanley Cup final, the audience number in Canada was down substantially from the average of 3.28 million viewers who tuned into last year?s Stanley Cup final ? Game 5 in the New York Rangers-Los Angeles Kings series. Moreover, Monday?s Canadian rating was the lowest in a Cup-deciding game since 2003, when the Anaheim Ducks and New Jersey Devils drew 2.2 million.
If these ratings numbers are as heavily impacted by how good the teams are as you are suggsting and Shoals inferring, why were the Cup finals similarly affected? Chicago and Tampa are good teams who played a good series. It's not like the LA-New York series had a Canadian team in it. So why are ratings down everywhere?
It's probably a combination of things. Cord-cutting(ESPN has lost 7 million subscribers in the last two years) is making it's way to Canada. In shifting games to Cable, you're losing a lot of potential eyeballs before the puck is dropped and regardless of who's playing.
2badknees said:
I really doubt that average fans are "genuinely excited" to the point where revenues haven't been affected. Perhaps its not evident directly in ticket sales, with a huge base of legacy season ticket holders, but fan interest is clearly down specifically in the toronto market. I've had constant offers for free tickets this year, and even on fan websites game day threads are pretty sparse.
Look, I could talk about shifting habits in media consumption all day but that's secondary to the real issue here. Let's say we agree on the "what", the actual contention is the "why".
The contention put forth was that what caused a dip in fan interest was the team's terrible play during the second half of last year and that that was a good reason not to trade a host of players at the deadline. However, nobody has really suggested that trading the players the Leafs did really caused that terrible play. The suggestion is that if you trade a player like Komarov, people will stop watching. But people are already not watching. So the question becomes what is most likely going to make Rogers happier, keeping around a relatively low impact player like Komarov? Or the team rebuilding themselves into a good one as quickly as possible?
The article you cite seems to make a basic point. If a team is bad, fewer people watch them. Not "if a team is bad, but has likable third line grinders, TV numbers are fine". The Leafs are bad and were always going to be. They are by design. I'm guessing management is far more concerned with getting them good than making them a slightly more appealing bad.