NHL's opening night tripleheader on ESPN leaves fans disappointed

After a long summer, NHL fans were in for a treat with three games back-to-back to begin the 2025-26 season. However, there were some missteps along the way in the opening night tripleheader that have left the NHL faithful with much to be desired.

Tuesday afternoon start was a head-scratching choice

Understandably, the NHL did not want to compete with the National Football League or even college football by having a weekend opener. That makes sense, somewhat, as the league surely wanted to maximize the amount of fans tuning in to the first day of NHL action for the 2025-26 season.

But in the rush to squeeze three games in on a weekday, there was no choice but to drop the puck at 5:00 ET in order to spread out the matchups across the evening. That's only 4:00 CT or 2:00 PT. They effectively alienated all West Coast NHL fans who were still at the office in the middle of their workdays and could not tune in. How is that growing the game or supporting the existing fans who were looking forward to NHL action returning to their TV screens? If it's going to be marketed as a tripleheader, an entire evening of hockey, doesn't that mean it should be accessible to as many fans as possible?

Imagine being a fan of the Chicago Blackhawks and being stuck at work until 5:00, not being able to watch the first period of your favorite team's first game in six months just because the NHL was trying to pack three games in on a random Tuesday afternoon. That is a bit disheartening and makes very little sense on the NHL's side of things. Wouldn't they want to optimize the number of eyes on the game for such a highly-anticipated slate of games?

Granted, the last game of the evening kicked off at 10:30 EST or 7:30 PST, so there was still an option for the West Coasters to tune into. But nevertheless, a large swath of fans was rendered unable to watch part of the tripleheader which seems to go against the spirit of what the NHL was aiming for.

Changes to ESPN+ limited the number of fans who could tune in

For those of us who rely on streaming services like ESPN+ to watch NHL games, a new development prevented a large number of fans from being able to watch the tripleheader.

ESPN+ has been upgraded to a two-tiered streaming service called ESPN Select and ESPN Unlimited. Former ESPN+ subscribers were grandfathered in to the Select program, which costs $11.99 a month or $119.99 a year, while the Unlimited package costs $29.99 a month or $299.99 a year.

The NHL tripleheader was played on ESPN's cable channel, which Select subscribers do not have access to unless they already have a separate cable package of their own. Only Unlimited subscribers get automatic access to ESPN's cable broadcasts. That means that people who previously relied on ESPN+ for their hockey streaming needs could not watch any of the action without paying for their own cable service, or paying an entra $18 per month to upgrade to the higher tier.

Once again, this raises the question of how is this supposed to grow the game for the NHL? Cable is already going out of style, and many fans who exclusively use streaming for their TV needs are going to opt out of paying more just to watch a couple of extra games here and there.

Commercial break mid-ceremony?

It felt like there was surprisingly very little fanfare around the Florida Panthers' championship banner raising. Perhaps there was more of a presentation in the arena that was not shown on air -- which would be a problem in and of itself -- but basically all that happened was Aaron Ekblad carried the Stanley Cup onto the ice, and the players gathered to watch the banner.

Inexplicably, ESPN cut to a commercial right at the very moment that the Panthers were raising their championship banner on live TV. Fans watching at home got to see a snippet of the players standing arm-in-arm as the newest banner was lifted to the rafters, but the moment lasted around a minute before cutting to several minutes of advertisements. The full clip, which cuts off just seconds before the commercial break, can be found below:

After winning what's often referred to as the most difficult trophy in sports, you'd think the Panthers deserve a bit more than a truncated celebration in their first game of the new season.

Between the ill-timed advertisement and the lack of solid planning to maximize the amount of fans watching at home, the NHL missed the mark with its season opener.