News

NBC pulled the plug on coverage of the overtime period between the Ottawa Senators-Buffalo Sabres on Saturday, denying viewers in most of the United States the conclusion the Eastern Conference final's Game 5.

A source close to the National Hockey League Saturday called the decision to prematurely end the telecast "disappointing," but said the network's contract with the league allowed it to pull out after three hours.

NBC dropped the overtime period, which decided the series and sent the Senators to the Stanley Cup final, because it didn't want the hockey telecast running into its scheduled 90-minute coverage of the Preakness Stakes starting at 5 p.m. EDT.

NBC's move will be seen as an embarrassment to the NHL. Networks, as a rule, do not leave a live sports telecast until it's over. In 1968, NBC was widely criticized for dropping an Oakland Raiders-New York Jets game in its final minutes to air the movie Heidi.

Even more disappointing for the league is the fact that the winning goal was scored at 9:32 minutes of the first overtime period, at about 5:20 p.m. NBC could have stayed with the game and then immediately switched to the Preakness coverage leading up to the race, which didn't run until after 6 p.m.

However, Preakness advertisers had paid for commercials in the time period starting at 5 p.m.

"It was a contractual situation with the Preakness," a source said.

The NHL has little influence in these sorts of decisions. The league, at the conclusion of its deal with ABC-ESPN in 2003-04, was unable to reach a TV rights deal with a major U.S. network. Instead, it settled for a profit sharing arrangement with NBC.

In terms of audiences, there's a huge gulf between viewership for an NHL playoff game, even one as important as Saturday's, and a major U.S. event such as the Preakness.

NBC will earn a rating of about 5 (percentage of U.S. households tuned in) for its Preakness telecast. The NHL playoffs on NBC is producing an average rating of less than 1.5.

Two NBC affiliates, one in Buffalo and the other in Western New York, did stay with the Ottawa-Buffalo overtime period.

At the end of the third period, host Bill Clement told viewers that NBC would not be airing the overtime time period. He informed them that it would be carried on Versus, the NHL's cable rights holder in the United States.

The problem is NBC is in about 110 million U.S. households while Versus is distributed to 72 million homes. A large number of viewers would have been shut out.