It’s near-impossible to watch international hockey games, and the NHL’s deal with ESPN has not grown coverage in comparison to NBC. Now, many Devils, Rangers, and Islanders fans have a choice between overpriced streaming apps that don’t do their jobs or not being able to legally watch the game.
It hasn’t even been a full week of the New Year, but Devils fans and hockey fans have already had a fair bit of frustration, starting with Optimum’s decision to cut sports broadcasting in the New York Metropolitan area. Meanwhile, the NHL and IIHF are still falling flat on their faces every time they are met with an opportunity to market the game. Let’s dive in.
The MSG-Optimum Dispute
Just days after the founder of Cablevision and HBO, Charles Dolan, died at the age of 98, Optimum followed the legacy of its former parent company by entering into a dispute with MSG Networks, leading to the channels going dark at midnight on New Year’s Day. Just like the disputes Cablevision had with MSG Networks in the 1980s, this one is supposedly centered around whether MSG should be a basic cable or a premium subscription option, per The Desk.
Altice, the parent company of Optimum, wants MSG to be a premium service, just as Charles Dolan and Cablevision wished (and received) in the 1980s. Dolan did not reacquire MSG until 1997, and his desires for sports broadcasting as a premium service led to George Steinbrenner and YankeesNets founding YES Network in 2002, after Dolan, trying to wield his power, tried to buy the New York Yankees and was denied. Steinbrenner had his eyes on his counter-move in YES for years, and eventually won out.
The present situation is a bit different. Altice, who wants MSG to return to its former status as a premium subscription service, is mostly butting heads with James Dolan, who took control of MSG in 1999. His father, Charles, sold Cablevision to Altice for $17.7 billion in 2015. Altice is now using similar monopolization tactics to those used by the Dolans in the 1990s, acquiring more and more networks so they can raise prices on consumers, withholding broadcasting to force customers into a corner.
But the reality is: Optimum already has regional and local monopolized areas scattered around the northeast, as many cable companies do in the areas they operate in. If you cannot watch the Devils on Optimum, and you call or message to complain, you might be turned to vouchers for Fubo. Well, if Optimum is already charging $160 a month for a full cable package (before the internet charge, as Optimum is likely going to be the sole source of internet in its service areas), who in the world would want to pay Fubo $80 per month to pick up their coverage gaps?
Fubo has also dropped SNY, so you cannot even get the full New York area sports package there. It actually seems that DirectTV is now the only place you can get all of YES, SNY, and MSG. I certainly would not have pegged DirectTV as the best place to subscribe to before now, given I haven’t been in a house with it in something like 10 years. But yes, DirectTV makes these channels available on its “Choice” tier, at $89.99 above their basic “Entertainment” package at $74.99, but well below its “Ultimate” and “Premier” tiers at $119.99 and $164.99, respectively. But $160 a month isn’t enough for Optimum to offer MSG.
Optimum’s lowest internet price is $89.99 per month. Now, if you have Optimum internet and cable, and you want to watch the Devils, Rangers, Knicks, or Islanders — and you want to do it without using illegal streaming sites — you have to pay $330 per month. But, of course, there’s more. There are ESPN+ exclusive games: that runs another $11.99 a month, unless you take one of Disney’s higher-price “value” package deals.
Consider the position that Altice and Optimum are taking, too. They argue that MSG, who is offering a lower cost in 2025 than what Altice paid in 2024, is asking for too much, and that they should become a premium subscription channel, like HBO or Showtime. Customers already paying a lot for cable and TV in Optimum-serviced areas (and their package deals are not available to all customers due to their disinterest in expanding fiber coverage), and adding dollars and cents onto the monthly bill might just result in some people giving up on watching sports entirely. (Now nobody gets anyone’s money.)
But I do not expect Josh Harris and David Blitzer to pull a Steinbrenner, here. The situation has changed, and the Dolan family is no longer the entity to be beaten. Bally/FanDuel Sports has the Guardians. NBC Sports has the 76ers. The NFL operates on a completely different level with regionalization through cable channels. Their holdings are too disparate and distant to make a Harris-Blitzer television venture make sense, and they would just run into the same problem with Altice demanding they be packaged as a premium channel. I had hoped they would sell their broadcasting rights to YES Network last year, but now they are stuck with a blacked-out channel for however many years. Maybe this situation might drag on long enough that they might be able to be legally relieved from the deal to find alternative coverage, as Steinbrenner did, but I would not hold my breath.
World Juniors And How ESPN, the NHL and the IIHF Have Failed to Promote Hockey
The United States Under-20 Team took home the Gold Medal at the 2025 World Juniors Championship last night, but I was barely able to watch any of the tournament thanks to the lack of effort that the IIHF, NHL, and their broadcasting partners have in promoting hockey. In the United States, unless you are subscribed to NHL Network, which is in the premium tier for most cable packages (where Optimum wants to move MSG, and also where DirectTV has it — in their $119.99 tier), you could not have watched last night’s game without either watching a bad livestream on YouTube or going to an illegal streaming site.
This is despite ESPN having had the ability to broadcast some of their games on ESPN+. Instead of simulcasting the games, with NHL Network subscribers being able to watch on TV and ESPN+ subscribers being able to watch on streaming, ESPN instead offered riveting, top-tier matches such as Kazakhstan vs. Sweden, or whatever. The last game they broadcast there was a quarterfinal match between Sweden and Latvia, and they broadcasted zero games involving the United States or Canada. I watched the first game they had there, but once I figured they wouldn’t put a North American game on there, I stopped checking.
There’s never a shortage of college football or basketball to watch on television, and ESPN always makes sure to get as much of it as they can onto ESPN+. So why did they bother pursuing the broadcasting rights to the NHL if they were going to show no interest in expanding coverage of an international tournament as large as World Juniors? Surely, they, with their significant stake in TSN, would understand the value of making this available to watch, especially as TSN broadcasts IIHF games in Canada.
If these people were serious about growing hockey in the United States, Bob Wischusen would have been calling Teddy Stiga’s golden goal on ESPN+ with some simulcasts on TV. Maybe Americans, who have won the tournament for two years in a row, might actually want to watch the games, too. It’s bad enough that Hockey Canada has ingrained itself enough in the IIHF to demand hosting the games every other year, limiting the number of times America can host — but they don’t even bother to give us widely available broadcasting.
The Winter Classic and the NHL’s Refusal to Move on From the Teams of Yesteryear
Shocker: expansion teams and bad teams do not draw ratings. The Winter Classic matchup between the Chicago Blackhawks, who are headed for another top-3 draft pick, and the St. Louis Blues — a middling team — drew a record-low 920,000 viewers on TNT and truTV. Jon Lewis for Sports Media Watch writes:
The Blues’ win, which peaked with 1.2 million in the 6:45 PM ET quarter-hour, declined 16% from the previous low set last year (Golden Knights-Kraken: 1.10M) and 48% from Penguins-Bruins two years ago (1.78M).
The NHL’s decisions to keep giving away these games to their favored franchises — the Chicago Blackhawks and expansion teams — is killing their ratings. The Golden Knights fanbase, for all the team success it was immediately handed, was apparently too small to warrant a Winter Classic appearance so early in its existence. But worse than a good team that not a ton of people watch is a bad team that almost nobody watches.
Perhaps, just perhaps, teams who are currently successful (or were at least expected to be halfway-decent this season) should get these games. Why not a Devils-Capitals game at Nationals Park or SHI Stadium? Why not a Kings-Wild game at Target Field? Why not the Colorado Avalanche? Why not the Florida Panthers? Why not a cross-border battle between the Oilers and any good American team?
The NHL actually outperformed the clinching game of the NBA Finals with its Game 7 ratings, with over 16 million in North America watching the Panthers beat those Oilers, with the NBA Finals reaching just 75% of that count. (The World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers also outperformed the NHL and NBA, with its Game 5 reaching two million more viewers than the NHL, though its international ratings reached over 30 million). With the right marketing, the NHL is right there to have millions of eyes on it on a regular basis. But sticking their head in the sand, rewarding bad (and unsavory) teams, and not making broadcasting widely available will keep the sport in the dark while the MLB and NFL have no issues pushing the right buttons.
Your Thoughts
Have you been personally impacted by Optimum’s decisions? Are you able to watch the Devils? Did you watch the Winter Classic or World Juniors? Will you pay more money to keep watching games, or will you wait the ordeal out? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and thanks for reading.