The NHL appears to have cracked the code on an enfeebled midseason tradition, as the league’s move to replace its largely uncelebrated All-Star Game with a round-robin international tournament has served up strong ratings—and a whole lot of fierce competition—for its media partners.
Thanks to a gritty performance from the U.S. team, which locked down a championship berth after Saturday’s bare-knuckled 3-1 victory over Canada, those 4 Nations Face-Off TV deliveries are zooming past expectations. Per rushed Nielsen fast-national data, ESPN’s telecast of last night’s game averaged a staggering 4.4 million viewers; by way of comparison, that beat out the average deliveries for each of the first six games of last year’s Stanley Cup Final. (Game 7 of the Oilers-Panthers series averaged a five-year high of 7.66 million viewers on ABC.)
Saturday’s action, which also included Finland’s much-needed 4-3 overtime win against Sweden, coincided with the first weekend without a national football broadcast in 175 days. The NHL seized on the opportunity posed by this relatively quiet period on the sports calendar, staging a rare showing of hockey’s 49th-parallel rivalry in the primetime slot.
While things had been chippy between the two hockey superpowers long before Team Canada beat their neighbors to the south in the gold-medal round of the 2010 Winter Olympics, recent spasms of political weirdness have helped turn the animosity up a notch. Apparently, there have been no tariffs imposed on fists, as three fights kicked off within the first nine seconds of Saturday night’s game.
After Connor McDavid tore the roof off the Bell Centre with an early goal, U.S. goalie Connor Hellebuyck put the clamps down, making 25 saves on the night. Jake Guentzel returned fire five minutes after McDavid scored, making it 1-1 at the end of the first period. Dylan Larkin scored the go-ahead goal before Guentzel made things academic with an empty netter in the waning seconds of the third.
In beating Canada, the U.S. secured a pass to Thursday night’s championship game. For Canada, a win against Finland on Monday sets up a rematch with the Bros. Tkachuk, only this time Team USA will enjoy home-ice advantage of sorts down in Boston.
Per Nielsen, the opening nights of the 4 Nations Face-Off showcase have been an unqualified success, as hockey fans demonstrated more interest in the new format than they have in recent years for the NHL’s usual midwinter exhibition. Thursday night’s matchup between the U.S. and Finland averaged 1.55 million viewers on ESPN, topping last year’s All-Star Game (1.4 million) by 11%.
Despite the U.S. team’s 6-1 rout of the Finns, the ESPN telecast beat out each of the last three ASGs—the 2021 game was canceled in light of ongoing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic—and nearly matched the deliveries for 2020 (1.69 million). The blowout also stands as the most-watched NHL game of the 2024-25 season, beating out the previous high of 1.27 million notched by ABC with its Feb. 8 broadcast of the Golden Knights-Bruins game.
Hockey beat all comers on the dial Thursday night, as ESPN’s telecast easily won the night in the dollar demo with a 0.54 rating—good for nearly 725,000 adults 18-49. That topped TNT’s competing coverage of Thunder-Timberwolves by 59% and more than doubled FS1’s opposing presentation of the NASCAR Duel at Daytona. Nearly half (47%) of the U.S.-Finland audience were members of the adults 18-49 demo; by comparison, the under-50 demo accounted for 41% of the deliveries for the opposing NBA game on TNT and 19% of the larger NASCAR crowd. (FS1’s telecast averaged 1.82 million total viewers.)
The puck dropped on the 4 Nations tourney with an overtime duel between Canada and Sweden that averaged 1.05 million viewers on TNT and truTV. That marks the fifth-biggest delivery for a hockey game since the NHL season began in October. As was the case with Friday night’s game, the advertiser coveted under-50 set made up 47% of the audience for the Canada-Sweden opener.
Canada’s 4-3 victory also beat out all but two primetime broadcast shows in the demo, trailing ABC’s anchor comedy Shifting Gears by 80,454 adults 18-49 and falling short of the Season 13 premiere of Fox’s The Masked Singer by 26,818.
(The second paragraph has been updated to include the Nielsen data for the audience of Saturday’s U.S.-Canada game on ESPN.)
