If The NHL Knows What's Good For Them, They'll Give The 1st Overall Pick In The Draft To The Philadelphia Flyers Tonight
The most important thing to remember about the National Hockey League is that it's a business. What's the most important thing to a business? Money. Making a lot of it. And how can you make a lot of money? Easy. There's this little thing called advertising.
All you need to do is get a shit ton of people to watch your product, show those numbers to companies that already have a lot of money, and then they'll pay you money just to put their logo on shit and run some commercials. I didn't go to school for ad sales or anything but it seems like a simple process to me.
The only issue is if the numbers go down, so does the money. And everywhere you look right now, numbers are down in the NHL. Local broadcast ratings are down. National broadcast ratings are down. Despite the fact that the lead is flooded with superstars all over the place, people just seem to be tuning out hockey. This is coming at a particularly brutal time when players are making more money than ever before. Eventually the league and these teams aren't going to be making enough money to actually pay the players. Go check out the KHL if you want to see what that kind of financial disaster can do to a league.
So unless you want an NHL team in China, Gary Bettman needs to do something here and he needs to do it fast. Obviously the easiest solution would just be to market the players better to get more people into hockey. But the league has failed tremendously at that over the years, and they don't have enough time to try to correct their flaws now. They need a quicker fix. And it's staring them right in the face tonight at the 2023 NHL Draft Lottery.
A good Philadelphia Flyers team is a crucial for the NHL. Philly is one of the biggest sports market in America across the board, but it's starting to drop off in hockey right now. Hard to blame the City of Brotherly Love considering the team has been complete and utter dog shit. I'm talking about the most pathetic sorry sack of shit franchise you've ever seen over the past couple of seasons. And during the 2021-22 season, Philadelphia saw a 39% drop in ratings. Honestly I'm surprised it took that long for the ratings to drop that drastically, but that's what makes Philly such a crucial market for the NHL. You don't even need them to be a dynasty for the city to tune in every night like it takes for Pittsburgh fans. You just need to give them a decent team to support.
Even with the 39% ratings drop in the 2021-22 season, Philly was still a top-10 US market for the NHL. Think about that. They dropped 39% and were still top 10. Can you imagine what the numbers would be if they picked up 15-20% instead?
The NHL needs Philadelphia. But right now, Philadelphia doesn't need the Flyers. So the league needs to do everything in their power to change that. The quickest solution would be this fella right here.
As it stands right now, the Flyers have the 7th best odds to land the 1st overall pick in the draft lottery tonight with 6.5% odds. Improbable, but not impossible.
However, look at some of the other teams ahead of the Flyers in the lottery odds. Anaheim leads the way with 25.5%, but Anaheim doesn't give a fuck about hockey and they never will. Connor Bedard will waste away a crucial 10 years of his career in Anaheim without the NHL making a penny off of him. Columbus is fine but I mean…fuck off. Chicago has 11.5% odds to move up to the 1 spot, but does that franchise actually deserve another 1st overall pick? After all the shit they've pulled over the years? Didn't think so. San Jose doesn't give a shit about hockey. Montreal doesn't help because they're in Canada and I'm pretty sure the socialism up there means the NHL has to get rid of 50% of their broadcast ratings anyway. And then the Arizona Coyotes will have less fans watching Connor Bedard play than he's had since he was 14 years old.
Moving the Flyers up to the 1st pick is the only way. Like I said at the beginning, the NHL is a business. And if the only way to properly operate that business is to rig a few ping-pong balls to make sure the city of Philadelphia gets a superstar who can turn the organization around and jack those broadcast rating numbers up? Then so be it. That's how you save hockey in America.
P.S. -- Only took me 3 tries. The NHL can easily get away with this one.
