The NHL Holds the Cleanest Specialist Position in the Secondary Tier of Sports Leagues

The bottom line up front

The NHL holds the cleanest specialist position in the secondary tier: clear local-team ownership, strong loyalty within its geographic base, and a competitive position on the live-game experience. The brand’s 4.6% MMS and 55.8% awareness place it at the top of the secondary tier alongside NCAA Men’s Football, but its strategic situation is different — NHL’s footprint is regionally concentrated, demographically narrow, and operating without the cultural-moment tailwinds available to other secondary leagues. The strategic priority is to deepen engagement within the existing core rather than chase incremental national share that the data shows is unwinnable on current investment levels.

In this briefing, we use the Category Advantage research framework. A few terms you should know:

• Mental Market Share (MMS) measures a brand’s "mental availability"—how often it comes to mind, compared to competitors, when consumers think of buying in a category
• Category Entry Points (CEPs) are the specific needs, motivations, situations, or feelings that trigger a consumer to consider a product category and the brands within it
• Network Size refers to the average number of distinct usage occasions or buying situations that consumers mentally associate with a brand

Where the NHL Stands

Top of the secondary tier on awareness; mid-pack on share. NHL’s 55.8% awareness is the highest in the secondary tier, above Olympic Games (53.6%), NASCAR (53.6%), WNBA (49.6%), and UFC (45.0%). MMS of 4.6% ties with Olympics and trails only NCAA Men’s Football (5.0%) among secondary leagues. Mental Penetration is 57.3% among NHL-aware consumers and network size is 9.2 — a meaningfully broader CEP footprint than UFC (9.0), NCAA Men’s Basketball (8.8), or any soccer league.

Emotional connection is shallow despite real ownership. EC of 3.12 trails the focal three meaningfully and sits below NCAA Men’s Football (3.99) and Olympics (3.41). The pattern is unusual: NHL has strong mental advantages on team-loyalty occasions but doesn’t convert them into deep emotional bond at the population level. This is a tells-you-something pattern — the regional concentration of NHL’s actual fan base means national EC averages dilute strong local bonds.

The mental advantage profile is balanced and team-anchored. NHL holds three meaningful positive advantages (+3 or higher): supporting hometown teams (+5.4), favorite team in season (+3.9), and looking for an exciting live game (+3.7). All three reflect the core hockey value proposition: city-by-city loyalty, season-long narratives, and live-event drama. Disadvantages cluster on social/cultural occasions: social-media discovery (-2.8), international tournaments (-6.1), women’s sports (-7.9) — all consistent with NHL’s positioning.

The CEPs the NFL Owns — and the Ones It Doesn't

Northeast and high-income households are the strongest segments. MMS 7.1% in Northeast (+2.4pp) and 6.2% in $100K+ households (+1.5pp). The brand over-indexes among economically engaged consumers in legacy hockey markets. LGBTQ consumers also over-index (+1.9pp).

Black Americans and Gen Z are the deepest structural gaps. MMS 2.2% among Black Americans (-2.5pp) and 2.8% among Gen Z adults (-1.8pp). These are not advertising gaps; they are participation-and-access gaps inherited from hockey’s historic demographic composition. Closing them requires multi-year youth-hockey access investment, not media buys.

The gender gap is wide but addressable. Female MMS of 5.0% (vs. 4.4% male) and Female EC of 2.74 (vs. 3.47 male). The gender pattern is unusual — Female MMS slightly exceeds Male MMS though Female EC remains lower, suggesting broader but shallower female engagement. PWHL co-promotion is the most credible lever.

What’s In the Way

Distribution fragmentation hits the NHL specifically. ESPN+, TNT, and regional sports networks fragment NHL distribution more than any other major North American league. The 20% category-wide “can’t find games” barrier applies acutely to NHL because routine fan engagement depends on local-team broadcasts that are increasingly behind separate paywalls. This is the single largest revenue-leakage source in the data. 

National broadcast scarcity caps mental availability outside hockey markets. Outside the Northeast and traditional hockey footprint, NHL competes for limited national broadcast slots against NBA and MLB. The 4.6% Total MMS likely understates the brand’s position in core markets but accurately reflects its limited mental footprint nationally.

The cultural-relevance ceiling is real. Without the NBA’s creator-driven cultural integration or NFL’s calendar dominance, NHL’s growth is structurally capped by what local-market engagement plus playoff-window national attention can deliver. The data is consistent with a brand near its natural ceiling at current investment levels.

What to Do About It

Defend the local-team moat aggressively. +5.4 on hometown teams is the brand’s most durable asset. Regional sports network strategy, accessible season-ticket packages, and minor-league/AHL brand integration are the highest-leverage investments. National brand-building competes with NBA and MLB on terrain where NHL cannot win; local-market deepening compounds existing advantage.

Solve distribution before solving anything else. The reactivation pool is large — awareness is 56% and Mpen is 57% — but consumers can’t find games. Streamlining national distribution and reducing the streaming-discovery tax is the single highest-ROI move available to the brand. Every other initiative compounds off this one.

Stop chasing the cultural-moment occasions. International tournaments, social-media discovery, and big-cultural-event CEPs are structurally not NHL’s. Investment in these dilutes capital from the team-loyalty and live-game occasions where the brand actually wins. Specialist positioning beats broad-positioning attempts the brand cannot fund at competitive scale.

About this research

Morning Consult conducts over 30,000 daily proprietary surveys in 45 countries covering more than 5,000 brands and 50 economic indicators. 

Our category advantage research is aimed at understanding the needs driving consumers in your category — and how your brand can own more of them. This research is built on validated principles of brand-driven growth and powered by Morning Consult’s industry-leading sampling technology.

Measure the true drivers of brand strength

Capture both mental availability (the likelihood your brand comes to mind when consumers face a need or occasion) and emotional closeness (how strongly consumers connect with your brand), benchmarked against competitors.

Uncover Category Entry Points (CEPs)

Directly tied to mental availability, see the specific needs, occasions, and triggers that drive purchase decisions in your category, and how strongly your brand is linked to them.

Pinpoint growth opportunities

Direct investment toward the moments and consumer segments with the greatest potential to grow your brand.

Turn insights into action fast

Get survey results in 4–5 days through a centralized dashboard and short-form memo that equips stakeholders with clear direction on where and how to win.

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