by Michael Fox

Created on: June 28, 2009

Don't let the fact that NHL television ratings and attendance numbers at game have gone up over the years since the NHL lockout from a couple of years ago. The NHL is still struggling to get people to pay attention to its product. While people in Canada are paying attention on a regular basis this is not the case with people in the United States. The NHL is going to need to work very hard if it is going to compete with the NBA in the future.

A good thing to do is to look into finding more American talent. The NBA has all sorts of stars who are American. LeBron James is from Ohio, Kevin Garnett is from Chicago and so on. The NHL is very different though. Alex Ovechkin is Russian and there are several Canadian stars like Sidney Crosby and Jarome Iginla. There are hardly any real American stars that are household names. The NHL will need to look into getting in touch with more American stars whether it be through one of the junior hockey leagues in the country or through the many colleges that have NCAA hockey programs. There is no need to give incentives to teams who draft Americans though; that would be unfair to the players looking to get into the league.

A new television contract will also be important when competing for fans. Although Versus has become a more popular and powerful television station over the years it is still not available to millions of viewers. The same goes with the NHL Network in that it is not available in all markets. When the league had its games on ESPN it wasn't too popular but at least it got a good amount of exposure. Thanks to ESPN severing its contract with the league and the network focusing on its NBA coverage the NHL has greatly lost the level of exposure that it had. If the league got back to having a contract with ESPN it would be able to get more Americans to pay attention again.

Moving the season around would be a good option too. The fact that the NHL competes directly with the NBA is a major problem. If the NHL had its season start in the middle of September instead of the middle of October it wouldn't be in direct competition with the start and end of the NBA playoffs. Reducing the playoffs from a 7-7-7-7 line to a 5-5-7-7 line would be good as well. No regular season games will need to be cut from the schedule.

Finally it will be best to look into the cost of going to NHL games. More teams have been increasing their ticket prices over the years and during the current economic recession this is not a good idea. Higher ticket prices will turn away fans. The NHL will need to address this and enforce a policy to get individual teams to reduce their ticket prices. Setting a limit on the average cost of a ticket in a venue may be a good idea. This can encourage more teams to offer cheaper tickets so that more people can go to these games. This could not only help to keep the NHL from embarrassing itself with poorly attended games but also to give teams that don't draw well like Phoenix, Atlanta or the New York Islanders some help.

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