Final Numbers

Complete numbers, as highlighted in bold, are now available for the final round of this year’s Stanley Cup Playoffs:


CBC was able to draw an average of 3,135,000 for the six game series between the Flyers and Blackhawks, producing the public broadcaster’s best Audience per Household (“APH”) figure of the playoffs at 0.241. As with previous rounds, there seems to be some controversy as to the exact average, although this time the NHL is low-balling the numbers by its report that CBC only drew 3,107,000. But, the last time I checked, the six-game average of 3,164,000 (game 1), 2,775,000 (game 2), 2,960,000 (game 3), 2,439,000 (game 4), 3,396,000 (game 5), and 4,077,000 (game 6) does, in fact, calculate to 3,135,000 and not 3,107,000. Either way you look at it, the series outdrew the second round Canadiens-Penguins matchup, which had been the public broadcaster’s top draw prior to the Stanley Cup Final.

It was quite another story at RDS, where the average audience for the final round of only 656,000 gave the French-language specialty channel its worst APH figure of the playoffs at 0.219 – less than half what the channel had been earning for the previous rounds involving the Montreal Canadiens. If, as Pierre Houde indicated last week, more than 1,500,000 people watched the decisive game of the Stanley Cup Final on his network, it could have only been at the game’s peak. According to BBM Canada, the audience average for the entire game on RDS was only 970,000. For comparison purposes, that’s lower than the 1,126,000 average that watched the decisive game of the previous year’s Stanley Cup Final – and this, despite the fact that a new method for calculating viewers is supposed to yield inflated numbers when comparing to past seasons. Suffice it to say that the Canadiens third round elimination was pretty much entirely responsible for the network’s poor showing in this year’s final series.

The consolation prize for RDS is that the channel recorded the three highest APH figures in this year’s playoffs with its coverage of the Canadiens-Penguins (0.582), Canadiens-Flyers (0.556), and Canadiens-Capitals (0.446) series – all of which had better APH numbers than CBC’s coverage of the Stanley Cup Finals. Now it’s time to clean the slate – and do it all again next year!