Local hockey fans adjust to watching NHL games without Hockey Night in Canada on CBC

Local hockey fans adjust to watching NHL games without Hockey Night in Canada on CBC

Fans must pay to view after CBC, Rogers Sportsnet couldn't cut sublicensing deal for Saturday program

Brenda and Paul O’Shannacery-Topham are among those grappling with how they will watch the NHL on TV this year.

The CBC will not be airing Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday nights this year, meaning that, for the first time in almost 75 years, Canadians won't have a way to watch NHL games for free.

“Part of the fun was being at home, having people over, having a fun family night or something with the hockey game on the TV — I mean, all the way back to the Don Cherry days,” Brenda O’Shannacery-Topham told CBC News Saturday, ahead of a pre-season game between the Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames.

CBC and Rogers Sportsnet, the national rights-holder of Hockey Night, announced in July that they weren’t able to reach a new sublicensing deal that would have let the public broadcaster air the program.

Fans can still subscribe to watch games on cable channels or streaming platforms, like Sportsnet and Amazon Prime. But according to Moshe Lander, a sports economist at Concordia University in Montreal, the cost of fandom will vary based on how invested a person is.

CBC will no longer air NHL games in 'end of an era' as broadcast deal expires

“If you want to watch all of your team’s games, if you want their merchandise, if you want to be able to go to a couple of games a year, it's a very expensive proposition,” Lander told CBC News, adding that the cost of being a sports fan is rising faster than inflation.

“It's an issue of how badly do you want to watch it. Now to get something, you're going to have to give up something,” he said. “Up until this past year, if you wanted to watch, the only thing you really had to give up was your time. Now, it's your time and your money.”

CBC News spoke with several loyal Oilers fans who said they're willing to pay to watch their team on TV. But with general inflation and high ticket prices, they said they might have to sacrifice cheering from inside Rogers Place to afford the new subscription.

This issue isn’t unique to hockey, Lander said, noting that professional leagues for sports like football, soccer and basketball also have deals with various channels and streaming platforms.

Added cost aside, the multitude of services is causing some grief for both local sports fans and businesses alike.

“You have so many different subscriptions that you get lost in the sauce sometimes,” said Oilers fan Cory Cardinal.

Staff at The Cabin Pub and Party, a popular bar in central Edmonton that draws a diverse sports crowd, now have more logistics to navigate to play hockey on the big screens, said assistant general manager Britanny McCallum.

Instead of simply turning on its TVs, she said, the bar has to figure out when games are on cable and streaming, in part to adjust their TV inputs accordingly and prepare for potential Wi-Fi lags.

“[Customers] come in just expecting the game to be on — and they don’t have to think about those things normally,” McCallum said. “But now, I’ve found that a lot of them do [consider that]. I’ve been getting so many more phone calls like, ‘Hey, are you streaming this game?’

“For the general public, it’s kind of like they're unsure if their favourite bar is even going to be able to stream it.”

Lander, the sports economist, warns that the CBC losing Hockey Night will make hockey less accessible, which could affect the next generation of fans — as ticket prices are already pricing people out of attending games in person.

“This is the type of thing that, 10, 20 years out, you're going to find there's an entire generation of fans who say, ‘The only thing I know about hockey is the 30-second clip that I get on Instagram or on TikTok, and beyond that I don’t really know anything about that,’” Lander said.

He noted that Canadians getting to watch the NHL for free — aside from sitting through commercials, say — was an anomaly. But now that they must pay to view, Lander hopes fans get their money’s worth — on the ice, but also through better broadcasts and access to players.

“The last thing you want is that you take advantage of this generation at the expense of the next generation,” he said.

Nicholas Frew is a CBC Edmonton reporter who specializes in producing data-driven stories. Hailing from Newfoundland and Labrador, Frew moved to Halifax to attend journalism school. He has previously worked for CBC newsrooms in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Before joining CBC, he interned at the Winnipeg Free Press. You can reach him at nick.frew@cbc.ca.