The National Hockey League season is almost over, yet French-language TV rights to 39 Habs games are still available for next season, a highly unusual state of affairs.
On the ice, the Canadiens are doing better than at almost any time since the team won the Stanley Cup way back in 1993. Behind the scenes however, there is a storm brewing over the fate of broadcast rights.
The crazy thing is that just as the team finally exits from years of losing, it’s possible that francophone fans might not be able to watch all the games on conventional TV in the language of Lafleur as of next season. Last October, Bell Media, which owns RDS, announced that the French-language sports network will broadcast 45 regular-season Canadiens games a year as of next season. That’s down from 60, which is how many games it’s broadcasting this season and has been the past 11.
This is a disappointment for I would guess the vast majority of Habs fans, both anglophone and francophone, because RDS is our preferred place to watch our team. Even us anglos prefer RDS to TSN or Sportsnet for the simple reason that we like our Montreal guys — play-by-play man Pierre Houde and colour commentator Marc Denis — to call the games. They know the team better than anyone else.
The Bell executives of course aren’t saying it, but the reason they’re broadcasting 15 fewer Habs games is because they cost too much. Habs games are RDS’s bread and butter. At the right price, they’d love to have all of them. But the current price simply doesn’t make sense for French broadcasters here in Quebec.
With RDS taking only 45 games, that leaves another 39 games — plus all playoff games — not spoken for. The regular season extends to 84 games from 82 starting next season.
In April of 2025, Rogers announced a new 12-year deal with the National Hockey League, with the telecom/broadcaster taking all Canadian rights for $11 billion. Run that figure around your head for a second. $11 billion. It’s nuts. I’m not a finance guy, but I don’t see any way even Rogers with its national reach via Sportsnet can make money on that deal. I think they do it because it helps them sell the Rogers brand. The new deal starts next season and goes through to the end of the 2037-2038 season.
Rogers then set out to sell off the French-language national rights in a side deal. Last time, it sold them to TVA Sports, but TVA could only get 22 regular-season Canadiens games — essentially the Saturday night games — plus playoffs out of that deal. The other 60 games a season became regional games, which the Canadiens sold to RDS, also for 12 years, at a reported price of about $1 million per game.
The previous deal, which Rogers paid $5.2 billion for, went from 2014 to the end of this season. So imagine the inflation here — from $5.2 billion to $11 billion.
That previous deal almost destroyed TVA Sports. Don’t take my word for it. Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau said publicly last year that TVA Sports might go out of business and everyone knows the biggest reason for its huge losses was this way-too-expensive deal. TVA Sports has lost close to $200 million in earnings since it began airing NHL games in 2014.
Rogers, the NHL and Quebecor have been deep in negotiations on this for at least a year now and there’s still no agreement in sight. Péladeau told the Globe and Mail this week that his company paid “a bit too much” in the last deal. What most observers believe is that the impasse is simple — they believe that Quebecor just isn’t willing to pay the price Rogers is asking and the problem is that Rogers and the league don’t exactly have a bunch of other places to go to place the games. The NHL has repeatedly stated that all of the games will be available next season in French.
But in practice, what does that mean? If Quebecor doesn’t buy them, who will? One scenario is that TVA Sports can take some of the games and the rest will go to a streaming platform, maybe Amazon or even Bell-owned Crave. The problem with this will be that francophone Habs fans will then have to shell out subscriptions to at least three services — say RDS, TVA and Crave — in order to see all the Canadiens games in their first language.
The irony is that the fate of the Habs games on French-language TV are in danger just as the team becomes a major force in the league. One of the reasons TVA Sports lost so much money under the last deal was that they paid big money to get all the playoff games for the league but the sad-sack Canadiens rarely did much of anything in the playoffs over the course of the deal. Mostly they were a pretty mediocre team.
Now they have a bunch of exciting young stars and most of us think they’ll be in the Stanley Cup conversation in the very near future. So you can imagine that francophone fans won’t be amused if some of the games are not available in French next season or if they have to pay even more to see the games en français.
À suivre.
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The post What the Puck: It’s possible that some Montreal Canadiens games next season won’t be available on conventional TV appeared first on Montreal Gazette.
