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3DTJNE5 Milan, Italy. 22nd Feb, 2026. Goalkeeper Connor Hellebuyck of the United States saves the puck during the ice hockey men’s gold medal game between Canada and the United States at the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games in Milan, Italy, Feb. 22, 2026. Credit: Tao Xiyi/Xinhua/Alamy Live News
A memorable finish to the Olympic hockey tournament delivered a milestone audience for NBC.
Sunday’s United States-Canada Olympic men’s hockey gold medal game averaged 18.6 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, per a combination of final Nielsen data and Adobe Analytics — the largest hockey audience of any kind since the 2010 Olympic gold medal game between the same two teams, which aired in a mid-afternoon window (27.6M).
Viewership doubled the previous high over that span, 9.3 million for last year’s “Four Nations Face-Off” final between the same two teams. That was the only other international tournament since 2014 to feature “best on best” competition after the NHL kept its players out of the 2018 and 2022 Olympic Games.
While sports viewership has generally benefited from Nielsen’s methodological changes of the past few years — including its inclusion and expansion of out-of-home viewing and shift to a new metric combining its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes — it is highly unlikely that those changes would make a difference in where Sunday’s game ranks historically.
The combined viewership figure includes a streaming audience of 3.7 million tracked by Adobe Analytics, the largest for any NBC Sports program outside of the NFL. (That puts the Nielsen-only audience around 14.9 million. NBC’s position is that because Nielsen does not track its streaming viewership, its combined Nielsen + Adobe audience figures are comparable to the Nielsen-only figures of other networks.)
The United States’ win — which peaked with 26.0 million during the 10:45 AM ET quarter-hour when the game concluded — delivered the largest audience on record for a sporting event that began prior to 9 AM ET, according to NBC. There are of course select few live sporting events that start before 9 AM ET, perhaps most notably the final round of the British Open. Per NBC, no other sporting event in that window reached the 10 million mark.
Encore presentations of the game, including an afternoon replay on USA Network and cut-down late night showing on NBC, averaged 2.1 million. NBC added that to the live total to get to an audience of 20.7 million.
Versus other comparable international competitions, viewership more-than-tripled the audience of the Olympic women’s hockey final between the same two nations, which aired in a weekday afternoon window on cable (5.3M). It fell short of the 2024 United States-France Olympic men’s basketball final, which drew 20.3 million in a Saturday afternoon window, as well as the Argentina-France FIFA World Cup Final four years ago — which aired in a similar Sunday morning window, but had the benefit of leading directly into the NFL (22.32M).
Jon Lewis has been covering the sports media industry on a daily basis since 2006 as the founder and main writer of Sports Media Watch. You can contact him here or on the social media websites X (Twitter) or Bluesky.
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While many have praised it, I would say my only complaint with the NBC Olympics was their hockey coverage for both the men’s and women’s tournaments with the schedule and announcers. There was much anticipation going into the tournament about the NHL players returning to the Olympics, as well as the fantastic 4 nations tournament last year that produced massive viewership numbers for hockey. The first 3 round robin of the American team games were all on USA cable. While NBC broadcast had many events to cover, there were opportunities over the first and second weekend to broadcast one of the team USA games. They had weekend coverage from 7am to 6pm et. The elimination round was better with NBC televising the US games. But, regarding the women’s games, I thought NBC and the Olympic committee did a terrible job scheduling the gold medal game at the same time as the women’s figure skating final (the Olympic premiere event). With NBC investment, they could have pushed the IOC to schedule the women’s gold medal game to a different time/day. This led to the women’s gold medal game being on USA cable, which was a terrible disservice to the sport. I know there are a lot of logistics involved in the scheduling, but this needs to be rectified for the next winter games. It may be wise to reschedule and have the women’s gold medal game on the final day, and the men’s gold medal game on Saturday. If the NHL players continue to compete in the Olympics, this schedule would give them an extra day to get back to resume the season. Regarding Kenny Albert as the lead play by play announcer of Olympic hockey, he is getting a lot of accolades for his call of the gold medal game. However, I find him to be a “generalist” who can call many sports good, but not great. He does football and baseball for Fox, local basketball (knicks) and hockey (Rangers), as well as being the NHL lead announcer on Turner. He doesn’t have that great lead national voice. And at times he forgets the audience for the Olympics. There are many people who only watch hockey during the Winter Games. Sometimes he expected fans to know the minutiae of the game. An example of this was his mentioning that his analyst Ed Olczyk competed in 3 Canada Cups in the 1980s. There was no explanation what the Canada Cup was (basically a World Cup with NHL players). The casual Olympic fans would have no idea about this. And NBC relied too much on Albert to do all the Olympic hockey. He did every big game for the men’s tournament, and every woman’s US game. NBC under-utilized Brendan Burke, who is a terrific hockey announcer. He was stuck in a studio in Connecticut doing low level Olympic hockey games. NBC could have given him a lot more (Maybe split up the men’s and women’s). He is excellent and I think he should get a lead pxp announcer for the NHL in the next rights deal. Regarding the analysts, I think Ed Olczyk does a good job. But he has been doing it for a long time, and it may be time for a change and move Brian Boucher to the main analyst spot. Boucher was brilliant. He really should also get a lead role in the next NHL rights deal. On the gold medal game, I thought some of the best segments were of Boucher breaking down the game with Mike Tirico at intermission.
Slightly off topic, but, since they obviously have the streaming numbers for Peacock, do you think that NBCU would ever release streaming numbers for Peacock exclusive games outside the NFL (NBA, College Basketball, Big Ten Football, etc…) ?
They do that sometimes for Premier League, but I strongly doubt you’ll see them do that for any other properties.
Thanks for the reply! I was just wondering as Peacock has had couple of ranked on ranked college basketball games recently.
Just to piggyback on Patrick’s thought, because with St. John’s-UConn Wednesday, Michigan State-Purdue Thursday and the B1G Men’s Basketball First Round in a few weeks, these games are also shown on the re-animated NBCSN channel. It’s still way too early for NBCU to mention households and numbers on a linear channel less than 4 months old, right, Jon?
Yes — and I’m sure that will never be Nielsen rated. I think the networks aren’t eager to have people know the audiences for some of these platforms. We still don’t know any viewership figures for SEC Network or ACC Network.
I assumed US-Canada for Olympics gold might be popular. But, ~20 million viewers is shockingly high for early Sunday morning. A very nice sendoff for the 2026 Olympics
FYI, I believe World Cup 2022 Final averaged ~26 million US viewers (~17 million English on FOX, ~9 million Spanish on Telemundo/Peacock) rather than the 22.32M listed in the article
For an early morning game on a Sunday to bring in that many viewers, that is quite impressive as maybe this model NBC engaged in for the last 2 Olympics seems to be working wonders as they won’t have to worry about that for the LA Games, but for the French Alps one, they now have a model that is successful but Brisbane in 2032 might be a different story.
Great numbers as expected. Jon. Is the highest viewership US hockey game the US-Russia Miracle on Ice game in 1980?
Great ratings as expected.
Do you think the NHL will see a little bump in ratings now? I also wonder at what kind of ratings we’d have been looking at had the game aired in an afternoon slot, maybe 25-30 million?
Maybe. Obviously previous title games never had that impact, but U.S. also lost all of those games. So might be different coming off of a win. But I would always lean toward minimal, or even zero, impact.
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© 2026 Jon Lewis, Sports Media Watch
© 2026 Jon Lewis, Sports Media Watch
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