Knocking off the big guy is becoming routine for Réseau des Sports.
On Thursday night, the Quebec-based cable channel again outperformed the CBC's Hockey Night in Canada, drawing 1.737 million viewers for its telecast of the fifth game of the Boston Bruins-Montreal Canadiens series.
It was a record audience for RDS and it also bettered of the 1.211 million for Hockey Night by more than 500,000 viewers.
Over the five games, RDS has averaged 1.591 million, compared with the CBC's 1.343 million.
This is remarkable because RDS has a modest reach. It's in 2.6 million households, mostly in Quebec. The CBC, on the other hand, is distributed nationally to 13 million homes.
John Shannon, the NHL's head of broadcasting, calls RDS's performance "one of the great success stories of the season."
But the results are not entirely a surprise. RDS has been posting big audiences for three years. This trend has been building.
In 2005-06, when the NHL returned from the cancelled season, the Canadiens audiences on RDS averaged 566,000 a game, up 25 per cent from 2003-04.
The next season, when NHL numbers at other networks levelled off, RDS's jumped a further 27 per cent to 717,000.
The channel held the 717,000 average in 2007-08.
Comparatively, Rogers Sportsnet averaged 370,000 a game for its Toronto Maple Leafs regional telecasts. Despite Sportsnet's wider distribution - about 2.9 million households in Ontario, compared with RDS's 2.1 million in Quebec and 500,000 outside the province - its Leafs audiences were 48 per cent smaller than RDS's Canadiens average.
What does the comparison tell you?
For starters, the Canadiens have a more dedicated and passionate following on Quebec TV than the Leafs do in Southern Ontario.
Some of that can be explained by competition. The Leafs share the Toronto marketplace with the Argonauts, Blue Jays, Raptors, Toronto FC and, to some extent, the Buffalo Bills.
The Canadiens have Quebec to themselves, with the exception of the Montreal Alouettes receiving attention during the football season.
But RDS has exploited the Canadiens' popularity by aggressively promoting the telecasts. Shannon describes the marketing as "remarkable and very creative."
The club and network marketing departments work closely together. Theme nights have been employed, such as the Tuesday night telecasts in which youth-oriented programming is built around the game telecast.
Nationally, the Canadiens' profile on the CBC has been in decline since the 1970s.
The team, during the glory years of the 1970s, shared Saturday nights with the Leafs. The two would alternate as the CBC's national broadcast.
That started to change in the 1980s, and by the 1990s, the Leafs owned Saturday nights. Except on rare occasions, they received countrywide distribution because they were perceived to have a larger following than the Canadiens. And, based on the TV numbers, they did. Without national exposure, interest in the Habs among CBC viewers declined.
In some cases, bilingual fans, frustrated by not seeing the Canadiens on CBC and not often enough on TSN, have subscribed to RDS, which airs every Canadiens regular season and playoff game.
Another issue is the quality of the telecast. In the 1970s, Danny Gallivan and Dick Irvin called the games for the CBC.
In addition to being superb broadcasters, they were Montreal-based and were identified with the team.
Today, the CBC doesn't have a consistent Habs voice because it doesn't consistently air Habs games. When Bob Cole, who calls most of the Leafs games, is parachuted in, he is criticized for not being up to speed, although his work on other telecasts have inspired similar grievances.
Pierre Houde and Yvon Pedneault are fixtures on the RDS Canadiens broadcasts.
NBC affiliates in the New York area will break into today's Philadelphia Flyers-Washington Capitals telecast for live coverage of an address by Pope Benedict. The league, however, has made arrangements for the telecast to also be available in New York on the MSG network.