It certainly speaks to demand. The Raptors intentionally designed the arena to spur demand, which is something that might have been different had the Leafs been involved a year earlier. I think any team in the heat of the playoffs would draw significantly higher than their capacities (I'm writing this while game 7 of the Stanley Cup is on and they are showing the hockey arena in St Louis full of people watching the game on the screens, and thousands more sitting in the baseball stadium in a downpour watching it on that screen). I remember back in the Blue Jays World Series years, they said they could sell 150,000 seats a game if they had them.

HUGE tv ratings from game 6 of the NBA finals... cool to see it was something that wasn’t hockey too... happy it was on TSN broadcast too instead of SN

I agree. I usually prefer SN for most things, but I love Jack Armstrong as the analyst on Raptors broadcasts more than Leo Rautins. Also incredible to see the cross Canada support in the various Jurassic Park viewing parties. I can't imagine another Canadian team in any sport having that happen.

7.7M average for Game 6 is massive. Spread across TSN/CTV/RDS. I think the ABC affiliate in Canada had 300K outside of that number. Toronto & Hamilton were at 82% share on TSN during the game.

Most watched sporting event in Canada in three years, presumably since the 2016 Rio Olympics.

The phrase "Canada's team" gets thrown around too often, but in this case - if it looks like a duck...

It'll be biggest sports story in Canada in 2019 by far, and probably the biggest in the last 5 years at least.

It has been a historic year in sports in general... New England Patriots/Tom Brady being the winningest most Quarterback in history, Tiger Woods winning the Masters, St. Louis Blues first Stanley Cup Championship, TO Raptors first ever title... Pretty crazy really.

According to this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...asts_in_Canada there have only been 10 broadcasts in Canada to have more viewers than Game 6 Thursday. 6 were 2010 Winter Oympics (opening and closing, and 4 Canada Mens's hockey games), 2 more were the 2002 and 2014 Olympics gold men's hockey games, Game 7 of the Vancouver-Boston Stanley Cup final in 2011, and the 2015 Super Bowl.

This was a fantastic number no doubt about it. It also shows what happens when the huge GTA block gets on the bandwagon. but a little perspective here for the under 35 set.

For someone who has lived through every one of the events noted above, nothing has come close (in any form you want to measure it) to the events below.

"Henderson has scored for Canada"
Bill Brioux TV Feeds My Family September 30, 2012

I’ve been up at the unplugged cottage, sanding and painting, so was not in front of my laptop Sept. 28 to do the 40th annual salute to St. Paul. A few catch up musings:

Henderson’s goal was, without a doubt, the most electrifying thing I ever saw on TV. It is hard to put in context how galvanized Canada was by that ’72 summit series, but we were, coast to coast. As a 15-year-old high school student, it seemed like the Olympics and the Stanley Cup all rolled into one, times eleven.

Just the whole exotic, behind-the-iron-curtain part of it ramped things up. Those last four games in Moscow were seen in Canada in the afternoon.

Johnny Esaw (or Seesaw, as some called him), our Olympic guy before Brian Williams, added an international TV edge. That last Canadian game in Vancouver, so disappointing, found Esaw on the other end of one of the most real and riveting Canadian TV moments up to that point, Phil Esposito’s raw rant at us sucky fans. That was the turning point, the Rocky moment, the wake up call for everybody to find some balls and get behind this team.

There hadn’t been many TV moments like that in Canada before. I remember Judy LaMarsh being caught on camera at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention telling a gaggle of fellow candidates, “Let’s get this bastard”—meaning Trudeau. That was a moment.

Other than that, most of those live, candid TV moments had been American. The ‘60s brought so many—Johnson’s dramatic decision not to run in ’68, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that same year, the assassination, war and race riot reports, and of course, the moon landing.

In Canada, up to that point, the big TV hot button had been the flag debate. Canada was all Hinterland Who’s Who. Gordon Sinclair asking Elaine Tanner on Front Page Challenge if her period got in the way of her Olympic swims was the biggest WTF moment.

The ’72 series gripped the nation because it was hockey, because it was our best vs. their best, because it was a Cold War sub story, East vs. West, their training and system vs. our drinking and taking the summer off system.

The shock to Canada’s pride after that first game was withering. I’d never seen my dad look so ill. Here was our chance to show those upstart Ruskie’s who the hockey boss is and we got our jock straps handed to us.

For many Canadians, colour TV was still fairly new. To see live broadcasts from the Soviet Union added to the mystique.

And then there was Henderson. The straight arrow Toronto Maple Leaf. The helmet wearer. The unlikeliest of heroes.

His three straight game winning goals in Moscow is all he needs to get into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Wake up, HofF dummies.

If you were a high school student, the Moscow games shoved everything else aside. Kids hid tiny transistor radios up their arms with headphones in their ears and passed along scores and penalties row by row. Teachers who caught them would demand they turn their damn radios up.

By the eighth and final game, my high school was one of many which basically gave up. They did the unprecedented--gave us a day off to watch a hockey game. And who could blame them? All of Canada came to a dead stop (even if no one in most of the rest of the world gave a crap.)

There were six or seven of us at my parent’s house on Dundas Street. The Clairtone was new and we were all glued to the game. When Canada was behind 5-3 heading into the third and final period (there would be no overtime), we all felt sick.

It was like being in a tiny life boat in the middle of the churning ocean. The grand old man of hockey, Foster Hewitt, had come back to make this last call and he stretched those Russian names the same way he re-invented Corn-why-eh, but that didn’t matter. Him calling the games also made it epic.

With those seconds ticking down, we were all standing, leading, praying. “Henderson makes a wild stab for it and fell.” You could see those guys were on the ropes with Canada storming back to tie the score. When Hewitt said, “Henderson scores for Canada!” that house on Dundas shook. We all leapt for the ceiling. We ran outside and screamed. It didn’t seem real.

A few years ago when the Canadian men’s team won the Olympic gold medal CTV put out a release stating that was the most-watched TV moment ever in Canada. This is horseshit. There is no comparison.

First of all the new ratings system introduced just prior to the Vancouver Games was still counting goldfish in the next room. Second, there were fewer entertainment distractions in 1972. There was no HBO or TSN or even CNN, just what you could pull in between channels two and 13 on the dial. City-TV was days old and you still needed a coat hanger and some tin foil to pull in their iffy UHF signal. There was no XBox or even a Betamax VHS machine attached to your parent's French Provincial set.

The reality is there was no way to estimate how many Canadians tuned in in ’72. There were no overnights as ratings results came in weeks later. Up until the ‘90s, Global was still taking their Ontario estimate and doubling it to get the national score.

The number, basically, was everybody. You weren’t going to miss this, and you would never forget it. Paul Henderson was our Neil Armstrong, and we were all over the moon.

Not sure the '72 Canada Cup is a fair comparison, since there so much less viewing options for Canadians (everyone really) back then. There were only so many channels, and a lot less entertainment options (sports or otherwise). It was easier to draw the masses in for big events because there was very little to compete against.

It's like when comparisons are made for movie boxoffice and Gone with the Wind is touted as having the largest domestic boxoffice draw (inflation adjusted). It's probably pretty accurate, but it's also easier to accomplish when you're pretty much the only game in town in 1939. Sure, 1972 isn't 1939 - but there's still a big difference between 1972 and 2019.

Now those Raptor ratings - are they including (via some sort of estimation/formula) the large amounts of people watching at Jurassic Parks and arenas/stadiums? And of course, there's internet streaming - which probably accounts for a respectable chunk since the NBA has one of the younger fanbases compared to other sports.

I admittedly watched the ABC feed as I find TSN/SN biased as hell. I did switch to SN when the Raptors won. Would that go down as a view for ABC if I'm watching in Canada?

I don't know if they try to estimate that, or how they even come up with the actual ratings they do now either. I remember participating in the mail in TV and radio diary things years ago, but maybe with digital now, they can tell what people are watching. I would think that the numbers for Super Bowls would be a lot higher if they could count or estimate the number of people at parties and bars watching the game. Same as the 3 hockey golds (even the 2014 when it was in the morning), I bet there as many as people out watching somewhere, rather than at home.

140K was the number of video starts on TSN's official streaming service for Game 6. I'd imagine illegal streaming would be a fair multiple of that. 140K is only about 2% of the total audience which is lower than usual American percentage for sport streaming (5%-10%). Could be that a lot of younger people were physically going out to the J-Parks or to bars to watch the games as opposed to staying in.

Either way, biggest sports event in Canada since likely the 2010 Olympics or, to put it another way: of the last decade.

Breakdown for Raptors Finals game 6:
TSN: 4.9M
CTV: 2.3M
RDS: 500K

English-Canada total for Game 7 of the SCF was 2.6M.

https://brioux.tv/blog/2019/06/15/ct...ratings-glory/

By championships. By win-loss record its Bo Levi Mitchell (0.841); although he lost last night to Ottawa.

If the Raptors manage to get back to the Finals in 2020 it will be interesting to see if those numbers spike higher. This run has tuned in millions of people to basketball that never followed basketball before. Some may not tune in again but the newbies that did might lure in even more newbies. 7.7 million is a huge number for Canada but the biggest was for the 2010 Olympic hockey gold win with an average television audience of 16,674,000.

Game 7 was likely about that range or maybe slightly higher. Either way all of the previous ratings records for basketball have been totally smashed in Quebec.

As a point of comparison, regular season Habs games generally draw between 750,000-1 million viewers in Quebec. Playoff games are between 2.5 and 3.5 million.

It's not impossible that in spite of Raptors fever reaching Quebec that the Bruins-Blues final had higher ratings. I can't find any but in previous years Game 7 of the Stanley Cup on RDS or TVA Sports usually topped 1 million.

Regular season Alouettes games are in the 200-250,000 range. Impact games are a bit lower, in the 150-200,00 range.

When the Alouettes are in the Grey Cup they'll top 1 million. The Grey Cup without the Alouettes is around 150,000.

When the Impact made their Champions League run against Mexican clubs they were in the 500,000 range.

The Super Bowl easily tops 1 million in Quebec.

Grand Prix auto racing generally tops 500,000 even with crappy time slots (Sunday mornings) for most of the races. Races with better time slots can be in the 1 million range.

This may be one where Quebec out-watches RoC. The 2019 Canadian GP on TSN had 531K, and the Azerbaijan GP had 355K on TSN. I haven't been able to find any numbers for RDS to confirm this for sure, though.

We're in the last year of F1 on TSN under the current agreement. Can't imagine it stays there after 2019.

Not sure how much TSN pays for F1 but those are pretty good ratings for the time slots the races are typically aired in.

They are all things considered. F1 has a new streaming service that they've rolled out in countries where their broadcast deals are a bit flexible and allow for it, whereas others like Canada have been prevented access. We'll likely get access to F1TV in 2020. There's a good article on this subject here: https://sportsbusinesscanada.com/f1-tv-pro-canada/

So far TSN & SN haven't shown much interest in outbidding DAZN for properties so we'll see what happens. I would imagine RDS wants it more than TSN given that RDS actually has a studio and commentary team for F1, unlike TSN which piggybacks everything off of SkySports.

They also have a guy who travels the world who covers every Grand Prix on-site, and jumps in on their live race coverage like a rinkside or sideline reporter.