2010 Winter Olympics: Success of U.S. Olympic hockey team an icy delight for NBC

NBC couldn't have drawn up a better script for the closing day of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. It will have the U.S. men's hockey team play in Sunday afternoon's gold medal game. Faceoff is scheduled for 3 p.m. EST.

At long last, appointment TV for a hockey game on a major over-the-air U.S. network. What next? Soccer?

To say Friday afternoon's USA-Finland match on NBC wasn't much of game would be an understatement. Ordinarily, networks abhor blowouts. But NBC will gladly take the USA 6, Finland 1.

With the U.S. team ahead 6-0 after the first period, studio host Al Michaels opened with "Believe it," an obvious reference to his 30-year-old "Do you believe in miracles" U.S. hockey call in Lake Placid.

"This is the equivalent of a football team leading another team 42-0 midway through the second quarter," Michaels said. "Go figure it."

Go figure that the U.S. hockey team would be so good to NBC. On Sunday night, its 5-3 victory over Canada gave cable's MSNBC 8.22 million viewers and a 4.3 rating to complement NBC's prime time audience of 23.3 million that weighed in with a 13.2 rating for ice dancing and taped skiing. Only the presidential election night in 2008 attracted more eyeballs to MSNBC.

ESPN readies pitch:

NBC, which has broadcast six consecutive Olympics, will be the home of the 2012 Summer Games in London. But the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro will soon be up for bids. ESPN is expected to challenge NBC for rights to those games.

Should ESPN win the Russian and Brazilian Olympics, the cable network apparently will offer a different approach. The over-the-air game plan of reserving primo events for tape-delayed prime time packages that has been used by ABC, CBS and NBC, may be history.

"I don't think non-live is sports fan-friendly," John Skipper, ESPN's executive vice president for content, told The New York Times this week. "It's hard for me to imagine, in our culture, not showing events live."

Market watch:

Not surprisingly, through Thursday night, Salt Lake City, home of the 2002 Winter Games, was No. 1 out of 56 major markets with a 22.2 average television rating for the first two weeks. Winter wonderlands Denver (21.9) and Milwaukee (21.4) were next, followed by Seattle (19.8) and Minneapolis (19.7) rounding out the top five.