My guess is that the biggest effect of poker on hockey isn’t that the viewers don’t want to watch hockey anymore, it’s that the cable networks don’t want to carry it.

Football shows on network TV a lot — it’s something a lot of people will go watch regardless of where it’s on. It brings in a huge built-in audience, and once it’s on the network, it makes the programming choice worthwhile by bringing in and keeping more casual viewers who just flip to the channel. It’s not much of a risk for a channel to show it, and you have the chance to really rake in a big audience on top.

Sure, there are hockey fans who are hard-core, but I’d venture that, if a hockey game is on ESPN or even on FOX back before the lockout, a whole lot of your audience is going to be just people who flip to the channel and see that it’s on. Your main concern is not to show something terrible that nobody will watch (like your alternative, the Bobby Bonilla Charity Bowling Tournament or something).

Cable stations are often really hurting for content (just try to sit through a day of G4 programming sometime — I think I watched six consecutive hours of Cops reruns during a sick day a while back), and they often run on shoestring budgets. The thinking a given sports network might be “I need to fill 24 hours of programming every day, but I don’t want to spend a ton of money on producing or marketing it myself. If I can just buy the hockey game, put it on, and it gets enough viewers, great. Done deal.”

The NHL is great for that — each team plays 82 games, and the playoffs for a given season last about 17 years. You will never hurt for programming if you have a license to show NHL games — unless there’s some sort of lockout or a season gets cancelled. And, yeah, it isn’t football or baseball, but it isn’t the Yukon Jack Women’s Wrist-Wrestling Championship, either. And it’s better than soccer.

Suddenly, hockey goes away. Crud, you need to fill ten hours of programming a week. Well, for the cost of a table, some chairs and a few grand in prize money, I can show people playing cards.

Hmm, that pulls in just as many people as hockey, and it costs me a ton less.

Oh, the other channels already do it and have brands and everything? Well, the game’s public domain. I’ll just make up a new brand.

Now you have, three, four, five different branded poker shows that produce for peanuts feeding a near-endless supply of programming to the cable stations. And people watch it.

The problem now isn’t that the hockey audience suddenly left — if the hockey audience was ever that big, it hasn’t been for a long time outside of certain regions. The problem is that the cable stations that needed hockey don’t need it anymore.

They incurred a cost when hockey left and they’ve invested their money elsewhere. Switching back to hockey would also incur an immediate cost (and a larger fixed cost in the long term), and there doesn’t seem to be enough of a reward in it to justify taking the chance.

Boston College hockey next year will be a lot of fun. They made a monster run this year and will be returning core guys on each line.

Schneider (our astonishing netminder) may even be staying.

So I can see the lockout helping poker, but I can’t see poker hurting hockey.

Serpico, I was at a couple of Boston College hockey games. Did BC hockey hold your attention for more that 15 minutes? Did you know they’re only losing 4 seniors this year? Should make next year another very good year.

Also, while wikipedia-ing that little nitpick, I came across this article, which makes a good point

http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1163458215626&call_pageid=1020420665036&col=1014656511815

Hockey didn’t bounce back from the lockout because the lockout happened during the rise of televised poker. Think about how much poker is on TV today and, if it were a sport, where it would rank among U.S. sports in popularity.

Televised poker is attractive to cable TV stations like ESPN for the same reason reality TV grew to ridiculous proportions and hockey has problems — the production process is vertically integrated and the content providor is either wholly owned by the distributor or doesn’t have any bargaining power.

As a producer, writers’ and actors’ guilds and owners’ groups cost you money. If you can just circumvent them and own the content yourself, you don’t have to deal with them.

The problem with the League was that they misdiagnosed where the squeeze was coming from — they thought they were getting outnegotiated by the players and that they had the muscle to put the screws to them, but really they were the ones being muscled by the media companies.

The owners weren’t in the position to put the screws to anybody, they basically had to do everything they could to provide the networks with hockey and thank them for whatever they were paid. They failed to do that because they, like so many bigwigs, assumed that cracking their labor force would make them more money than getting their product to market.

This is why the private equity offer for the NHL was so intriguing — if you take the owners out of the equation, the NHL is a great value proposition. With entrenched ownership and management, they’re going to insist on a bigger margin than they’re entitled to structurally and ruin it for everybody.