China Key to Unlocking NHL Olympic Hockey Boycott

For 50 years, the National Hockey League (NHL) has been struggling in vain to break through in the American television (TV) market. When Sidney Crosby won his 3^rd Stanley Cup with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2017, more Americans watched Celebrity Family Feud  than the NHL telecast in the same time slot. The next night, the National Basketball Association won the United States (US) ratings battle with an audience three times larger than the number of NHL viewers.

The Olympics account for the 5 most watched hockey games in US TV history. The NHL has never managed to turn an Olympic hockey buzz into more American viewers. No American audience for a NHL game has come close to the viewership for team USA playing an Olympic final or semi-final.

Disappointed by the impact of past Olympics on NHL ratings, Commissioner Gary Bettman decided that his league had nothing to lose by threatening to boycott the 2018 Olympics in South Korea. Bettman demanded free use of the Olympic rings logo in NHL advertising as the price of player participation at the 2018 Games. When International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach rejected Bettman’s condition, the NHL blocked their players from going to the 2018 Olympics.

Bettman and Bach are two alpha males locked in a stand-off. Neither will back down. 

Check out my article on prospects for ping pong diplomacy redux on the Rideau in the Ottawa Citizen:
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/sayeed-how-olympic-hockey-could-thaw-canada-china-trade-talks

(Update July 2020: I stand by this article based on what I knew in February 2018. Based on what has since emerged about Chinese government crimes against humanity, I am now opposed to any participation in the 2022 Winter Olympics.)

(How does this post connect to the Ontario economy and the other provinces? Canadians watching Olympic hockey in the middle of the nights and early mornings in February 2022 might have a small negative impact on productivity. That's the best I've got as an economic explanation. The sad truth is that I wanted to get this idea into circulation and I couldn't find a better outlet than my own blog. If the Chinese government releases Uyghurs imprisoned in Xinjiang, stops threatening Hong Kongers' freedoms and releases Canadians held hostage as a bargaining chip in the China-Canada dispute and you are interested in my proposal to solve the NHL-IOC impasse to salvage the 2022 Beijing Olympics, contact me at adil.sayeed@utoronto.ca)