Courtesy USA Today

(May 8, 2009) Niche leagues trying to climb out of relative obscurity hope to develop superstars who'll attract attention beyond their fan bases.
That's happening with Pittsburgh's Sidney Crosby and Washington's Alex Ovechkin in their ongoing NHL playoff series. Consider who TNT's Charles Barkley, on an NBA studio show, this week named as the best athlete in all of sports: Ovechkin.

Whatever bang comes from the two superstars' series now will come on cable TV's Versus. It got the rest of the series after NBC, this weekend airing golf, carried Game 1.

Versus, paying about $70 million in annual NHL rights fees and in its fourth season of covering the league, this year drew its best regular-season ratings and, so far, its best playoff ratings. Its regular-season games averaged 236,000 households — about 0.3% of the households Versus reaches. It's averaging about 374,000 households — 0.5% — in the playoffs.

Still Versus hasn't sold everybody. Paul Kelly, NHL Players Association executive director, has said veteran players "long for the days when you could find hockey on ESPN."

Versus, which outbid ESPN for the NHL, is in about 75 million households. ESPN is in 98 million. Compared to ESPN's last NHL season — 2003-04 — Versus' household average for regular season games this season is down about 43%. And compared to this point in ESPN's last playoffs, Versus current playoff households are down about 35%.

And consider other sports on ESPN whose average household ratings top Versus' current NHL playoff average: The College World Series (1.1 million households), pro bowling (672,000 households) and Little League World Series (582,000 households).

NBC, which pays no rights fees to carry NHL games, hasn't announced whether it will continue to cover the NHL next year. It averaged 1% of U.S. households for its regular-season games — same as last year — and 1.1% so far for playoff games — up from 0.9%. Those are ratings comparable to what NBC got for Arena Football.

NBC might want the NHL as a tie-in to hyping its 2010 Winter Olympics. But despite efforts to broaden hockey's TV appeal — Fox's glowing puck in the 1990s, ESPN relentlessly hyping its games, NHL players in the Olympics, expansion into non-traditional markets like Phoenix — hockey keeps drawing close-to-zero ratings. And in the 39 million U.S. TV households that don't get Versus, Ovechkin and Crosby can't do much about that this weekend.