Scott Stinson: ‘What channel is the hockey on?’ The NHL is back, and watching it is more expensive than ever

The Montreal Canadian's Juraj Slafkovský, left, shoots on the Toronto Maple Leafs Samuel Hlavaj during pre-season action this month. Photo by Icon Sportswire /Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

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The National Hockey League begins its regular season Tuesday night, which means we are just moments away from confusion across the land as fans try to find the games on their televisions.

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Traditional broadcast homes have been abandoned. New paid tiers have been introduced that will require fans in some provinces to subscribe to four services should they want to watch every game at home. And some of those services are streaming-only, meaning viewers used to finding the game on their traditional channel guide will be on a road to nowhere.

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Welcome to the NHL in 2026-27, the season that forgot about the fans.

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A sampling of this week’s schedule: Wednesday night’s game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Islanders at Scotiabank Arena, which for the past dozen seasons would have been available as part of Sportsnet’s national broadcast schedule, will now only be on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service.

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Saturday night’s game between the Leafs and Ottawa Senators, which would have been seen in most of the country on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, a staple since pretty much the invention of the television, will instead only be on Sportsnet. (The CBC will instead be showing Men’s Canada Super 60 Cricket League, which a majority of readers will have never heard of until reading this very sentence.)

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And next Monday, when both the Senators and Winnipeg Jets have games that were for a decade part of Sportsnet’s national package, they will instead only be available on Sportsnet+, a streaming service that will require an extra subscription.

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Fans of four of Canada’s seven teams — Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg — will have to subscribe to four different services, either through their TV provider or with separate digital subscriptions, just to be able to watch their full schedules: Sportsnet, Sportsnet+, TSN and Prime Video. (Fans of Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, whose regional broadcast rights are held by Sportsnet, will not require TSN, although any hockey fan who also wants to watch CFL or NFL football will need to subscribe to it, too.)

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It will, as you might expect, cost a lot. It’s impossible to put a specific figure on the total because prices will vary depending on provider, region, and whether the subscriptions are standalone or bundled, but it could easily cost upward of $500 over the hockey season to ensure full access to one of those eastern NHL teams.

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And while Canadian fans might want to place the blame for the situation on Gary Bettman, for the NHL commissioner is a natural villain in this country, the story is a bit more complicated than that — although Bettman does play a key role.

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“The new television landscape in this country is what Gary Bettman has wrought. And hockey fans will either have to bear steep new costs to watch games, or spend less time caring about the NHL,” writes Stinson. Photo by Tony Caldwell /Postmedia

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It begins in 2012, when Rogers Communications shocked the hockey world by scooping up the NHL’s national broadcast rights in Canada for $5 billion over a dozen years. After Rogers had effectively cut TSN and the CBC out of the picture, Bettman told the CBC to talk to Rogers about a way to keep hockey on the public broadcaster. That led to a frankly bizarre arrangement where Hockey Night in Canada remained on the CBC, but as Rogers-owned programming, with the private media conglomerate having full control.

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As the Rogers-NHL deal neared expiry, it was expected that the league would seek multiple broadcast partners, reflecting a trend in the industry where smaller chunks of live-sports rights are sold off to American streamers like Netflix, Apple TV and Prime Video, which increases the overall broadcast revenue.