Network Shuffle Leaves N.H.L. Out in the Cold

This just shouldn’t happen to a major sport during its playoffs.

But it happened to the National Hockey League on Saturday afternoon.

It is a story of two minutes in television limbo that crystallized the league’s persistent lack of influence in traditional news media. It is also the story of which TV sports property comes first in a network’s priority list — the N.H.L.’s Eastern Conference finals or the Preakness Stakes.

It happened on NBC, when Game 5 of the Buffalo Sabres-Ottawa Senators game went into overtime with the score tied at 2-2. At about 4:40 p.m., it was clear that if NBC stuck with the game through at least one full overtime, it would run over the first half-hour of Preakness coverage and beyond. So it did what it was contractually obligated to do: It switched early to the Preakness, while the cable network Versus was left to pick up the intermission and overtime coverage that NBC was leaving behind.

NBC’s priority is clear: It pays millions of dollars annually to carry the higher-rated Preakness but nothing upfront to the lesser-viewed N.H.L., its partner in sharing advertising revenue.

(In preliminary overnight ratings, the Preakness’s 5.4 rating, down 5 percent from last year, was more than four times as high as the 1.2 for the Sabres-Senators game.)

NBC, Versus and the N.H.L. had plans in place for a smooth overtime transition that would not pre-empt a second of the Preakness, the same plans that were readied in advance of the Kentucky Derby.

But a foul-up at Versus’ master control in Denver delayed by about two minutes the time before Versus took the Sabres-Senators handoff from NBC. Marc Fein, a Versus senior vice president, said, “Needless to say, it didn’t go as smoothly as we would have liked.”

John Shannon, the league’s senior vice president for broadcasting and a former hockey producer who loathes such mistakes, said: “We believed the checks, double checks and triple checks were in place. It was one simple, human error. We talked all day. Everything was coordinated. Our concern was that people were told to go to Versus, and it wasn’t there right away.”

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The number of fans who knew about the NBC-to-Versus switch was probably narrowed by the single 20-second announcement made at the end of regulation that had the hurried feel of the end of a pharmaceutical commercial. But NBC could have done much better because its overtime plan to go to Versus was in play when Buffalo’s Maxim Afinogenov tied the score with 9 minutes 2 seconds left in the third period.

From there, NBC should have given viewers several messages about switching to (and finding) Versus before regulation ended.

Given the single warning — and the relative newness of Versus — it is reasonable to wonder if fans endured for the two minutes or so that it took for Versus to pick up the NBC feed, or if they wandered off? Were hockey fans loyal enough to Versus to bide their time before the strongman competition they were watching switched to NBC’s production?

(The only fans spared these broadcast-to-cable gyrations were those living in Buffalo and Rochester, the Sabres’ home markets.)

Of greater concern is the fact that only 72 million United States television homes receive Versus, about 40 million fewer than are reached by NBC, and about 20 million fewer than those who receive ESPN or ESPN2.

The switch to Versus meant nothing to those who couldn’t get it and underscored the league’s risk in leaving ESPN, which wanted to slash what it would pay to the post-lockout N.H.L., for the needier embrace of Comcast-owned Versus, which is paying $70 million this season.

When it was clear that Versus, not ESPN, would join NBC as the league’s television partner, N.H.L. officials should have asked NBC very, very nicely to rewrite its contract to permit postseason games that threaten to last beyond the start of the Derby or the Preakness to switch to CNBC or MSNBC, which it owns and uses for Olympic cable coverage. Mike McCarley, an NBC Sports spokesman, said the current deal let it shift an overtime game to one of its networks if Versus somehow refuses to do so.

Versus reaches nine million more TV homes than it did when it acquired N.H.L. rights. But adding 20 million more to equal ESPN’s universe is far off, a reality that will keep disenfranchising fans — no more so than when it shows the first two games of the Stanley Cup finals. “It’s not a perfect world,” Versus’ Fein said.

AIRWAVES The first game of the Yankees-Mets series Friday night attracted 754,000 households locally (454,000 on YES and 300,000 on SNY), an excellent showing, but well below what is believed to be the peak when two local channels have carried the same game. On June 14, 2002, nearly 1.2 million homes watched the Yankees win, 4-2, on a 10th-inning home run by Robin Ventura. That game was shown by Channel 2 and Channel 11.