While it might not be pleasant to remember Wednesday night’s disastrous game for the Canadian junior men’s hockey team, it’s worth trudging through miserable memories to find one Canadian winner: TSN.
The network’s broadcast of the IIHF World Junior Championship gold medal game, in which Canada lost to Russia 5-3, enjoyed an audience of 6.88 million viewers, according to BBM Canada.
BBM also reported that 14.2 million unique viewers watched at least part of the match, which Canada led 3-0 going into the third period only to allow five unanswered goals.
The average audience for the game was 6.23 million, “an all-time record for the network,” TSN said in a statement, “and the most-watched telecast on Canadian television since the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.”
RDS, TSN’s French-language counterpart, scored its second-highest audience ever for a World Junior match with 652,000 viewers.
The tournament was an overall ratings winner for TSN. The average audience for the seven Team Canada games was 3.2 million people.
It was the network’s 20th World Junior broadcast, which consistently ranks as a top ratings earner–eight of its top 10 most-watched programs have been IIHF World Junior matches.
