Less than 48 hours after a memorable Stanley Cup Final and shortly after a final wrap-up call with NHL officials, Linda Schulz admitted she was already thinking about her next assignment. Schulz, an ESPN vice president of production, oversees all aspects of her company’s NHL event and studio production, including the Stanley Cup postseason, but other sports fall under her domain, like tennis. It is a quick pivot from Jaccob Slavin to Jannik Sinner.
“I’m transitioning from ice to grass,” Schulz told Sports Business Journal, laughing, as she prepared for a talent meeting with her Wimbledon on-air broadcasters.
The wrap-up call between ESPN and NHL officials was understandably ebullient. The six-game series between the Carolina Hurricanes and Vegas Golden Knights averaged 5.2 million viewers, the most-watched Stanley Cup Final since the seven-game series between the St. Louis Blues and Boston Bruins in 2019 on NBC/NBCSN (5.5 million viewers). This year’s Stanley Cup Final was up 106% from the Final between the Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers on TNT/truTV last year (2.5 million), and up 26% from Panthers-Oilers on ABC in 2024 (4.2 million).
Expanding beyond the Stanley Cup Final, the viewership numbers tell a great momentum story for the NHL. ESPN networks averaged 2.2 million viewers for 43 playoff games, the company’s best viewership for the Stanley Cup Playoffs. TNT also had its best postseason since the start of the current deal, as playoff games across TNT, TBS and truTV averaged 1.4 million viewers, up 50% from last year. The league also posted its best regular-season numbers in 14 years.
One of the more interesting data points from this year’s postseason was the rise of female viewership and those between ages 18 and 34. ESPN said the Stanley Cup Final averaged 2 million female viewers, up from 807,000 last year. The average female audience for the entire playoffs was 786,000 per game, up 164% over 2025 (298,000 viewers). The 18 to 34 average audience for the Stanley Cup Final was 839,000 viewers, up from 456,000 from the previous year.
Said Schulz: “What’s been a hot topic recently is, why are there more female viewers coming in? Someone asked me, how do I steer our coverage to the new female audience that is coming into hockey? It was interesting because it was the first time I actually thought of how I’m adjusting, and the answer is I’m not. I’m still very focused on making sure that if a new fan comes in — male or female, young or old — we are including them in the conversation. When we analyze the game, can we speak to hardcore hockey fans and also find opportunities to include those that don’t know the players?”
You can trace the NHL’s momentum back to the 4 Nations Face-Off in February 2025. The final game between Canada and the United States drew 16.3 million North American viewers (and 9.3 million viewers on ESPN alone), thanks in part to the politically charged climate. Then came the Milan-Cortina Olympics men’s gold medal hockey final this past February between USA and Canada that attracted more than 27 million viewers across both countries. The hit show “Heated Rivalry” also brought new eyeballs to the sport.
“If we can make you feel that experience of being on the ice, we have at least half a chance of keeping a viewer that’s never had the opportunity to strap on a pair of skates,” Schulz said.
To that end, Schulz said this year’s Stanley Cup Final presentation — ESPN’s third since it regained NHL rights beginning with the 2021-22 season — was the company’s best when it came to access and technology improvements.
“We’ve spent the entire length of this current contract working with the league to improve access,” Schulz said. “We had sky cam over the ice. We had skate cam [on-ice, shallow depth-of-field rigs] going further and longer on the ice than ever before. We had four Supremo POV cameras at every hash mark or corner. Every game, we had a ref or linesman in a MindFly camera [a body-mounted camera system that records first-person video and audio].
“All of that wasn’t possible the last time we had the Cup Final.”
Shared success
ESPN’s history with the NHL dates back to 1979, when the then-fledgling company aired its first NHL game (Dec. 19, 1979) roughly three months after the network debuted. It was the first U.S. network to produce an NHL All-Star Game (1986) and had the U.S. national rights through 1988 before SportsChannel America acquired them.
After a four-year absence, the NHL returned to ESPN in 1992, and the company held the rights through 2004. Its current seven-year, $2.8 billion deal for the NHL’s top package was an intentional purchase by ESPN leadership who said they were attracted by the league’s younger and engaged fan base — the types of consumers who would be more apt to subscribe to a streaming service.
“When we got the rights to the NHL, I went to Mike McQuade [executive vice president, sports production], who was overseeing it, and requested to be on hockey,” said Schulz, who began with ESPN as a production assistant in 1995. “I was excited about the challenge of bringing the sport back to ESPN. I wanted to see what we could do creating our coverage plan from scratch.”
Lead NHL director Joe Iuliano initially helped build the studio side of the NHL production before moving to the game side. Jeff Dufine, ESPN’s lead game producer for the NHL, worked on college basketball and produced “Sunday Night Baseball” before joining the NHL team.
“In Jeff and Joe, you have an elite producer and director,” Schulz said. “As far as ESPN being committed to hockey, that’s the most clear representation of that. A top producer and a top director working the Stanley Cup Final is a pretty luxurious place to be.”
Schulz said ESPN had 500 or so employees assigned to the NHL during the regular season, including production staffing and crew support. It had approximately 165 people working in some capacity to put on the Final.
“From my standpoint, I can’t think of a stronger business relationship with any other league,” said Ashley O’Connor, ESPN vice president, programming and acquisitions. “I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of leagues, and our partners at the NHL are top notch. Whenever one of us has an idea, the other is always open to hearing it, even if it’s completely off the wall.
“We have the kind of open communication where we understand what’s important to them and they understand what’s important to us. We help each other to make sure that we are both seeing success, whatever that success is defined as for both sides.”
Schulz offered a tangible example of how this works.
“We’ve had skate cam before this year, but we wanted to push the access,” Schulz said. “During this year’s playoffs, we recognized there was an opportunity to have skate cam on the ice if a team called a timeout. So we went to the league and requested that access. The league then went to its various groups and checked on how it might work for the teams. The result was a new place for viewers to see the ice.”
“Another example are these little cameras that are buried in the boards where you can get great low-angle shots,” Iuliano said. “We used them during faceoffs and replays. If there was scruff on the glass or too much ice that had been scraped onto them during the game, I was able to talk to a representative with the league and say, ‘Can someone take a look at that when there’s a stoppage?’
“That’s a really great experience when you’re doing a high-level production and you have partners that can make real-time adjustments to make sure that our product, their product, is the best it can be.”
ESPN’s NHL production people shared the collective hope that its broadcasts will continue to add technology that takes viewers closer to the ice. The future of NHL broadcasts will almost assuredly include hyper-personalization options, such as viewing the game from the perspective of a specific player or officials on the ice. Schulz said she uses her 14-year-old son as a focus group for how to attack NHL coverage in the future.
“I immediately think of how he is watching sports — and he’s watching it on his phone while also in the living room on the TV,” Schulz said. “I’d like to see us have a more interactive experience that brings the access part more to his phone. My hope is that we can keep the fans invested in the live coverage part of it and not just looking for highlights after the fact.”
Media rights future
Prior to the start of the Stanley Cup Final, in his annual “State of The NHL” press conference, Commissioner Gary Bettman said he was “excited about the prospects” of future media rights negotiations, considering the viewership metrics and the clear momentum for his sport. The league’s deal with WBD and Disney expires after the 2027-28 season.
“We have exclusive negotiating periods that don’t begin until next calendar year,” Bettman said. “While there have been some casual discussions, we are not at the point where we are in firm negotiations. We will respect the rights that are in the contract and if things materialize sooner, great. If not, we are more than prepared to go through the usual routine of dealing with an exclusive negotiating period, which both Turner/WBD and the Walt Disney Co./ESPN/ABC have at the same time.”
William Mao, a senior vice president of global media rights at Octagon, offered some caution about making a presumption that the NHL is in for a bonanza, since it would be going to market within the relative same time frame as the NFL.
“On the one hand, the substantial rights fee increases secured by other Tier 1 U.S. sports properties, such as the NBA, are encouraging for the NHL’s prospects of achieving a similar outcome, particularly given the league’s strong growth narrative,” Mao said. “However, ongoing market uncertainty and disruption, the continued erosion of the traditional cable television ecosystem and more constrained spending by media companies raise questions about whether sufficient capital will remain available when the NHL’s current media rights agreements come to term.
“These challenges are compounded by the NFL’s active pursuit of early extensions to its broadcast agreements. Given the NFL’s outsized influence on our sports media landscape, any movement by the NFL is likely to have significant ripple effects across the industry, potentially forcing even premier properties, such as the NHL, to reassess their media rights strategies.”
Even with Mao smartly warning for caution when it comes to accessing future media rights, it’s hard not to see the NHL and ESPN/Disney continuing this partnership. Both sides are getting value from the deal.
“We’ve long viewed the NHL as a premier sports property — that’s why bringing it back in 2021 was such a priority for us,” ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro told SBJ during Stanley Cup Final week. “Growth among younger viewers and female fans is outpacing overall viewership. That kind of growth through the Stanley Cup Final tells you something. With ESPN’s reach across platforms and the full power of Disney behind us, we’re uniquely positioned to keep building on this.”
Building is a buzzword across NHL circles, too. Just this month the league signed a term sheet with Houston-based billionaire Dan Friedkin that grants him exclusive rights to bring an expansion franchise to either sunny Houston or Austin. The irony is rich — one of the hottest sports properties in the U.S. right now is a game played on ice.
