Ted Talk Written Speech

Unfortuantely, the best sport to ever be created, hockey, is not very appreciated in the United States of America. Not only should the sports fan of America appreciate it more but these people dont realize what it takes to make the NHL. From real life experience of playing the game of hockey, as a player you face a large amount of adversity. These NHL players played in many different leagues, spent hours and hours outside working on their stick handling and shooting and gave up many opportunities to go to the beach to chill with their friends, just to get the opportunity to play on this large stage and from my opinion, American sport fans do not appreciate this and dont take the time to appreciate the fact that these guys poured their heart outs for the sport of hockey all through their childhood. However, in defense to the sport fans across America, hockey is not just an American sport like for example, football, baseball, basketball and even a sport like nascar is. Hockey is viewed all around the world including countries like Canada, Russia, Sweden, Czech Republic, etc. My focus throughout this speech however is the sports fans across America and their view on the NHL and in this case, the NHL definitely takes the loss when comparing the NHL to the NFL, MLB or NBA. For example, the 2017 Super Bowl game "climbed to tie the second most watched Super Bowl ever for an average of 113.7 million viewers." Compared to the 2016 NHL Stanley Cup when "the sixth game of the 2016 Stanley Cup featuring the Pittsburgh Penguins and the San Jose Sharks averaged nearly 4 million viewers (3.948 million." Even though these are the most important games of the year for both leagues, the average amount of people who tuned into NBA regular season games is just another small detail to back up my point. "The most watched game this season across any network was the Christmas NBA finals rematch between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers on ABC, where it averaged 11,100,000 viewers." "Blues and Balckhawks opener had a 0.5 final rating and 905,000 viewers on NBCSN." On top of all this, the NHL is barely presented and broadcasted on Sports Center. If I decide to turn on the TV and turn on ESPN to watch Sports Center, for every 15 basketball or football highlights, you might see one NHL highlight. In my eyes, this is wrong and dont really think it is fair for the NHL to be treated like this by the sport fans across the United States. However, it is tough for the NHL to fix this because it is such a popular world wide sport. I think something the league should work on would be to pay more money to have important games previewed more by American sport fans, whether its commercials, making sure ESPN is showing more of their leagues highlights and also notifying the American sport fans when a big NHL game is going to be on TV. This would benefit the NHL in making more money as well as the sport fans across America getting a better taste of what the best sport to ever be created is like