Leafs Nation in uproar over Sportsnet surcharges for Monday night games

At 77 years old, Patricia Hardy has been a Toronto Maple Leafs fan longer than most of the team’s supporters have been alive. But when she tried to tune in this week to Sportsnet for the game against San Jose, she got a rude awakening: Her subscription no longer included NHL hockey on Monday nights. She’d already lost hockey on Wednesday nights this season after Sportsnet had sold off those games to Amazon’s Prime streaming service. And now this.

“She pays the big bucks on her little pension,” said Hardy’s daughter, Mel Sheedy, standing outside Scotiabank Arena before the Leafs game against the Rangers on Thursday night. Hardy, a retired nurse who lives in Simcoe, Ont., pays about $150 per month for satellite TV, according to Sheedy, almost exclusively to watch the Leafs and the Toronto Blue Jays.

Tyler Sheedy, Mel’s husband, said Hardy had texted after discovering she couldn’t watch the Sharks game. “Her exact words were: ‘TV is the only excitement I have now, and now they’re even taking that away,’” he said.

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That sort of despair and confusion ricocheted around Leafs Nation all week, juiced by a fair dose of anger across social media and even talk radio, after Toronto fans were confronted with the reality of costly and cumbersome programming changes Sportsnet instituted this season. Many seemed to take the changes like a personal assault. On the subway headed down to the arena on Thursday, fans had used various epithets – most of them unprintable in The Globe and Mail – to describe the situation.

The problem is this: After Rogers Communications signed its whopping $11-billion, 12-year renewal for NHL rights last year, it had to find a way to make the numbers work. It earns far more from fans who subscribe directly to its Sportsnet+ streaming service (retailing for $35 per month for standard programming, $45 for premium) than those who get the Sportsnet channel with their old-fashioned cable or satellite package (which nets Rogers about $6.50 per month on average).

So, just before the season started, Sportsnet announced Monday night NHL games would be available exclusively on Sportsnet+. Cable and satellite subscribers could go onto the Sportsnet+ app and pay a $13 monthly surcharge to add that programming. (Rogers Xfinity customers would get Monday night’s games without the extra cost.)

For the full seven-month season, that adds up to $91 – or $7 for each of the Leafs’ 13 Monday games. The economics are even worse for fans of every other Canadian team: Montreal plays six Monday night games this season, which works out to more than $15 for each game; Ottawa has seven games ($13 each); Calgary eight ($11.38 each); and Edmonton, Vancouver, and Winnipeg play nine (a little over $10 each).

Jim Pottruff was at home in Stoney Creek, Ont. on Monday night when his son, Grayson, came in the door after the first period and asked why he wasn’t watching the Leafs game. Pottruff had checked Sportsnet, which he gets with his Cogeco cable subscription, and hadn’t seen the game on the lineup, so he didn’t realize it was on. But after Grayson asked, he remembered seeing ads on Sportsnet explaining the Monday night games would be exclusively on Sportsnet+. So, begrudgingly, he bit the bullet and signed up for a Sportsnet+ subscription at $35 per month.

On Thursday night, as Pottruff and his son sat outside Scotiabank Arena before puck drop, I broke the news to him that he hadn’t actually needed to pay the full price, that he could have logged into the Sportsnet app with his Cogeco subscription and instead chosen the “TV Provider add-on” option for $13 per month.

He wasn’t thrilled.

“Oh, man,” he said. “All this stuff is offensive. The guys were saying on Overdrive the other night” – TSN’s drive-time show – “they’re like, the average schmuck that smokes in his house and has a beer there, he can’t afford to go to any games, he should be able to watch every game if he’s paying for some type of television subscription.”

“I almost feel, like, out of spite, just cancelling completely,” he said.

In a statement Sportsnet e-mailed me Friday afternoon in response to the anecdotes from Leafs fans I had shared, the company said it was “focused on delivering more NHL content, including more national games with fewer blackouts, to more Canadians across multiple platforms. Just as we agreed to terms with Rogers for their TV customers, Sportsnet is working with other Canadian distribution partners to give their TV subscribers additional options to access this Sportsnet+ content.”

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The statement went on to note the surcharge also buys access to other NHL games, including matchups between U.S.-based teams, as well as more than 125 NBA games per season and more than 100 MLB games per season.

None of which, if you listen to hockey fans, makes them feel any warmer toward Sportsnet. (I haven’t even mentioned the many fans who told me the rising prices and complications have pushed them toward IPTV, the pirate streaming alternative, or those who said they’re looking forward to CBC reviving the Hockey Night in Canada brand for PWHL games in December, since they don’t want to pay to watch the NHL regular season.)

Even some Xfinity customers who don’t have to pay extra for the Monday night games are disenchanted. “It should all be free,” said Shelley Ince, who had come to the game with her friend, Trish McBride – both of them Rogers subscribers. “You’re trying to support your hometown team, and people have to pay to watch it? I think that’s wrong, to begin with. It should be on regular television. Always.”

It’s hard to see how this ends well. The NHL needs to grow the game, not just extract more money from the fans and sponsors it already has. TV is a linchpin of the hockey ecosystem but it’s not the only part. Make the games difficult or expensive enough – that is, add enough friction – and people will just click on something else for their entertainment. The ads won’t get seen as much, the sponsors won’t get attention, the sports bets will begin to dry up.

For decades now, the NHL has regarded Canadian hockey fans as a bottomless well from which to draw love and lucre. People have wondered what it might take to break that bond. Maybe we’re about to find out.