The National Hockey League has made a remarkable recovery from the deathbed scenarios many predicted after the owners shut down the industry in 2004-05.The fan base has returned. The raw national cable and over-the-air TV ratings are awful, but the NHL’s many critics need to look beyond the raw TV numbers.

Sports no longer plays to a broad audience, the NHL like the NBA, Major League Baseball, the NFL, Major League Soccer, and NASCAR need to take care of the base before they go after the causal TV viewer or the person who might want to see a game a year. The NHL did just that.

The NHL Lockout ended on July 13, 2005, which was a little less than 90 days before the beginning of the 2005-06 season. All 30 NHL teams needed to reconnect with ticket holders for their luxury boxes, club seats, and regular season ticket seats. Getting the corporate community back in the fold was not really a problem. Businesses buy luxury boxes or club seats as a promotional tool for clients. But reconnecting with the everyday hockey fan might have been a cause for concern, except for one thing: Sports fans under the age of 30 (the ones advertisers crave) have become accustomed to labor strife. In the past quarter century, there have been three baseball strikes (1981, 1985, 1994-95) and an owners lockout in 1990, two NFL strikes (1982 and 1987), one NBA lockout (1998-99) and three NHL labor actions, in 1992, 1994-95, and 2004-2005. The new generation of sports fans – unlike their parents, many of whom took the 1994 baseball strike as a personal affront – take labor difficulty as part of the package.

Sports are no longer viewed in the same terms they were in the 1960s and 1970s. As part of the modern corporate entertainment industry, they live in the real world with real labor issues. Still, the owners have to sell a product, and that was what the NHL was faced with last summer. Once the league and its players settled their differences and the players accepted a salary cap, it was time to re-energize the NHL fan base in the arenas, in the communities, and on TV.

Coming out of the lockout, the NHL had less than 90 days to put together an American cable TV contract and sell corporate sponsorship.The 30 individual teams had to sell the big-ticket items – the luxury boxes and club seats – along with individual tickets, and sign local sponsorship agreements. It was an awful lot of work in a short time, especially when both the league and individual clubs laid off a good many workers, including sales specialists.

In the end, the NHL got the fan base back. The league set new records for total and average attendance: 20,854,169 fans went to NHL games this season, an average of 16,955 per game, an increase of 2.4% from the 2003-04 season and 1.2% higher than the previous record, set in 2001-02. In total, NHL teams played 1,230 games to 91.7% capacity.

The NHL’s good fortune began when it was able to land a cable TV deal with Comcast’s OLN network, best know for its Tour De France coverage. Comcast, the nation’s biggest Cable TV Multiple Systems Operator, was looking to beef up its Outdoor Life Network, and the NHL wasn’t too impressed with ESPN’s offer to carry its games in a revenue sharing deal. ESPN seemed less interested in the NHL product because its ratings were not good. ESPN was shrinking its NHL coverage anyway.

When Comcast, the cable TV giant that owns the Philadelphia Flyers, came up with a two-year, $120 million deal, the NHL jumped. ESPN, which had the right to match Comcast, declined, and the NHL became the anchor programming for OLN, a channel that was not readily available on basic expanded cable.The new deal was signed on August 18, 2005, a mere seven weeks before the regular season began.

OLN, which will become Versus in September, had about 20 million fewer subscribers than ESPN. But Comcast smartly offered games to regional sports networks and to cable operators who did not offer OLN. Comcast also switched OLN from a digital tier to basic expanded cable on their systems in an effort to make it more available to cable subscribers and created video on-demand possibilities for the NHL. The on-demand features included condensed games for the fast-forward generation, which grew up watching taped TV shows and SportsCenter highlights, and don’t have time – or the attention span – to watch an entire game.

For Comcast and OLN advertisers, landing the NHL has been a big plus, not least because the NHL has brought in viewers. OLN’s ratings grew about 275% when it showed an NHL game compared to other programming. People might think no one watches hockey, but having 600,000 households watching a Stanley Cup Final game on OLN was a huge improvement for the network.

Meanwhile, safety nets are in place. The NHL’s deal with NBC Sports is strictly a revenue sharing deal (both sides start making money once all the production bills are paid), and individual teams had deals in place with regional networks that are ongoing.

In the face of collapse, the NHL has done more than a billion dollars worth of business in the past year from ticket sales, licensing, and multimedia deals despite losing some sponsors along the way. The league did not fall flat on its face for various reasons, primarily because corporates came back to buy tickets and, most important, because hockey fans are loyal and never took the lockout very seriously.They knew there would be hockey eventually and returned when asked.

Hockey is never going to be a big TV draw, nor will it be a big talk-radio topic, but that doesn’t matter as much in the new world of sports technology, where broadband, condensed video, on-demand, cellular updates, and niche cable TV networks have become more and more a part of the fan’s experience.In the future, that is where leagues will make money. The NHL was smart enough to jump on board with both feet.

There are, of course, still some problems. Pittsburgh needs a new arena and could move next spring, but if the business is so bad, why is there interest from investors in Kansas City, Winnipeg, Hartford, and Houston? Perhaps the NHL, forced to modernize on the run, has finally come up with a good economic model for its owners and its fans.There is life after the lockout after all.