Canadiens Drive Second Round Stats

Canadian hockey broadcasters have released their viewership numbers from the second round of the playoffs and, like the first round, the Montreal Canadiens continue to produce the highest ratings. Continuing my practice from an earlier post, I calculated the Audience per Household figure (or “APH”) by dividing the average audience per series by the number of households reached by each network. The results are below, with the second round series in bold:

As was the case with the first round, the two English-language networks were blown-away by French-language specialty channel RDS, which posted an APH of 0.582. This means that, of the approximately 3,000,000 households with access to RDS, 58.2% of them had someone watching the channel’s broadcasts of the Canadiens-Penguins series. This was up from the 0.446 figure for the Canadiens first round series against the Capitals.

Over at the English-language networks, CBC earned the highest APH for the second round at 0.211 – also for its coverage of the Canadiens-Penguins. This comes on the heels of TSN winning the first round with an APH of 0.200 – get this, for the Canadiens-Capitals. In fact, all three second round series not involving the Montreal Canadiens had a worse APH than the Canadiens first round series.

A lot was said during the first round about CBC’s controversial decision to go with the Canucks-Kings and Senators-Penguins instead of the Canadiens-Capitals. Using the APH method, I was able to statistically demonstrate that the Canadiens-Capitals would have done better in the ratings department on CBC than the two series that the network had chosen. But the second round allows the cherry to truly be placed on the sundae – even CBC’s second round Canucks-Blackhawks series did worse than the first round Canadiens-Capitals on an APH basis (0.197 versus 0.200). What does all of this mean? Clearly, CBC should rethink any future plans to ditch the Canadiens because another network’s coverage (i.e. that of RDS) would carve-up the viewership pie. The reality is that the Canadiens viewership pie – even when carved-up – provides much larger slices than that of other teams.

As for TSN, the network was not able to reproduce its magic from the first round, as it no longer had the Montreal Canadiens (or any other Canadian team, for that matter) to drive ratings. Nonetheless, its Flyers-Bruins and Red Wings-Sharks series received higher APHs (0.125 and 0.117) than its three first-round series that involved only U.S.-based teams (0.090, 0.086, and 0.061). With its Stanley Cup Playoff coverage drawing to a close on Friday, TSN should be pretty happy with the numbers its posted this year.

TONIGHT'S GAMES:

Canadiens at Flyers - Game 2, 7 p.m. (CBC)/(RDS)

Blackhawks at Sharks - Game 2, 10 p.m. (TSN)