Boston Bruins forward Milan Lucic with the Stanley Cup after his team's Game 7 win against the... [+]
The Stanley Cup final still has at least two games to go, but it's already drawing a record television audience. Ratings for the first four games of the series between the Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins show the NBC telecasts are the most-watched Stanley Cup final since The Nielsen Company began tracking the broadcasts in 1994.
The games are drawing an average of 5.35 million viewers per game, according to NBC Sports. The series is tied two games to two, and returns to Chicago on Saturday night.
Three of the games have gone into overtime, and Wednesday night's game was a goal fest that ended in a 6-5 overtime victory for the Blackhawks. Wednesday’s game peaked with an audience of 8.192 million viewers, according to NBC Sports, while the average audience was 6.459 million on NBC.
That’s up 120 per cent from the same game between the Los Angeles Kings and New Jersey Devils in the 2012 final. There have been new viewership records set in games two, three and four this year, NBC says.
It's easy to understand why: these games are being played between two hockey mad, Original Six cities, where fans who aren't lucky to score tickets to the game jam into bars and onto patios to watch the contests. Both teams have won the Cup in the past three years -- the Bruins in 2011, the Blackhawks in 2010 -- and the memory of those victories is still fresh for fans in each city.
The record ratings are great news for NBC, since ratings for last year’s Stanley Cup final between the Kings and Devils hit a five-year low in 2012, according to SB Nation.
The telecasts averaged about three million people over the six game
series, down 33 percent from 2011, and the worst since 2007, a series
that featured the Ottawa Senators and Anaheim Ducks.
The peak rating over the last five years was the Philadelphia-Chicago match in 2010, with five million viewers, and this year's series looks sure to break that.
This year's fiercely fought Stanley Cup final, which is likely to be debated all summer in Chicago and Boston, is also great news for the National Hockey League, helping to erase fans' displeasure at the shortened season and long lockout.
Now: who's going to take home the Cup?
