The NHL regular season opens tonight, Tuesday, Sept. 29, with an ESPN tripleheader: Panthers at Hurricanes, Rangers at Bruins, Blackhawks at Golden Knights. For fans in Raleigh, Boston and Las Vegas, the first lesson of the season arrives on night one. None of the three games has a local telecast. They are ESPN exclusives, so the local channel a fan relies on all winter has nothing to show. The Hurricanes’ new local network does not broadcast its first regular-season game until Oct. 2.

That is the national layer, and it is the simple part. The local layer changed more this summer than in any recent season, and it no longer follows a single pattern.

Part 1 of this series covered how blackouts work in general. This part is about the NHL, where the question “how do I watch my team?” now has at least six structurally different answers, depending on which team you follow.

What happened over the summer

Two things went away at once.

Main Street Sports Group, operator of FanDuel Sports Network, announced in early April that it would stop operating. Six NHL teams had to find a new local home: the Hurricanes, Blue Jackets, Red Wings, Wild, Predators and Blues. A seventh, the Kings, stayed on the same channels, but the network is now run by baseball’s Angels as Angels Broadcast Television.

Then, on Sept. 1, the free streaming service Victory+ shut down. The Dallas Stars and Anaheim Ducks, who had used it as their local streaming home, moved to Prime Video. The Stars’ president said the team had not received about 98 percent of the payments it was owed.

Some of the replacements were finalized days before the puck drops. The Hurricanes’ cable deal with Spectrum was announced on Sept. 22. The Blue Jackets found a Spectrum home on Sept. 23, six days before the season opened. Fubo signed on Sept. 28 to carry all four league-produced networks. As of opening night, none of the four has a deal with Comcast Xfinity or DirecTV, and talks are continuing.

Six kinds of local home

Line up all 25 US teams and their local rights fall into six different models.

Model	Teams (2026-27)	What the fan needs
Free over the air for most or all games	Kraken, Golden Knights, Predators, Mammoth, Lightning, Panthers, Ducks	An antenna. Each team also sells its own streaming app
League-produced network (new this season)	Hurricanes, Blue Jackets, Wild, Blues	Spectrum or Fubo, or a paid stream on Prime Video
Team-owned or team-affiliated regional network	Bruins (NESN), Rangers, Islanders, Devils, Sabres (MSG), Penguins (SportsNet Pittsburgh), Blackhawks (CHSN), Avalanche (Altitude), Capitals (Monumental), Red Wings (Detroit SportsNet), Kings (ABTV)	Cable or satellite, or the network’s own subscription stream
National media group’s regional network	Flyers, Sharks (NBC Sports regionals)	Cable, or a Peacock add-on
No cable network at all	Stars	Prime Video, plus 17 games free on FOX 4 and FOX 4+
ESPN or TNT exclusive (any team, some nights)	172 national games: 53 on ESPN/ABC, 47 streaming on ESPN+, Disney+ and Hulu, 72 on TNT	The national network or platform, regardless of local deals

A single league now runs local distribution through antennas, a league-owned production unit, eight separately owned regional networks, a national media group’s regionals, and a streaming platform, often at the same time for the same team.

“It’s on Prime Video” is not one answer

The most visible change this season is Prime Video. It is now the exclusive direct-to-consumer streaming home for six teams: the Hurricanes, Ducks, Blue Jackets, Stars, Wild and Blues. It already carried the Kraken.

But the service is not enough to answer the question. Each club set its own terms. Stars, Ducks and Kraken games are included with a Prime membership. Hurricanes, Blue Jackets, Wild and Blues games are a separate subscription, $19.99 a month or $99.99 a year, and a Prime membership alone does not unlock them.

So two fans can open the same app, in the same week, with the same membership, and one gets their team while the other gets a paywall. For a “where to watch” feature, the record “Hurricanes, local, Prime Video” is correct and still misleading. What the user needs to know is which tier.

DAZN has a similar role on a smaller scale. From this season it is the exclusive streaming home for the four MSG teams and the Kings, and it also carries the Capitals’ Monumental+.

Territories that overlap, and fans who belong to two teams

Local rights only matter inside a team’s territory, and NHL territories are wide and overlapping.

• Idaho sits inside both the Golden Knights’ and the Utah Mammoth’s streaming territories.
• Hawaii is inside both the Ducks’ and the Kings’ territories, more than 2,500 miles from either arena.
• Alaska belongs to the Kraken’s territory.
• Kentucky is mostly Blue Jackets territory, yet the Predators added over-the-air stations in Louisville and Lexington this month.
• The Hurricanes’ territory covers North and South Carolina, most of Georgia and parts of Alabama.

A fan in Boise is in-market for two teams at once. On the out-of-market package, both are blacked out, and each team sells its own local stream covering a different set of states. Utah, by contrast, has not been Golden Knights territory since 2024-25.

Even the way a fan’s location is checked differs by product. ESPN determines location for its out-of-market NHL package by IP address. The Wild’s in-market stream checks that the subscriber’s billing ZIP code falls inside the team’s territory. The same fan can be “local” by one rule and not by the other.

Where the international games land

The NHL plays four regular-season games in Europe this season: Hurricanes vs. Kraken in Helsinki on Nov. 12 and 14, and Senators vs. Blackhawks in Düsseldorf on Dec. 18 and 20.

Being played abroad does not make a game national. The Blackhawks list both Düsseldorf games on their local network, CHSN, with the out-of-market package for everyone else. The Kraken list both Helsinki games on their local channels and Prime Video. A game in Germany is, for US broadcast purposes, a Chicago local game.

North of the border, the same season starts a new deal

For Canadian audiences, 2026-27 is year one of Rogers’ 12-year national deal. Sportsnet says it has lifted 150 regional blackouts and carries more national games than ever. It has also moved Monday night games exclusively to its Sportsnet+ streaming service. Thirteen of the Maple Leafs’ 14 Monday games are behind that paywall. Wednesday nights go to Prime Video Canada, and CBC is no longer part of NHL coverage.

In other words, fewer blackouts and more paywalls, arriving in the same season.

What this means for “where to watch” data

In the NHL, “where can I watch this game?” now depends on four things a fixture list cannot supply: the viewer’s territory, often overlapping, which of six local models the team uses, whether a national exclusive overrides it that night, and, on some services, which tier of the service the viewer has.

The US national deals with ESPN and TNT run through 2027-28, so the national layer changes again in two seasons. The local layer did not wait. It changed this summer, some of it in the week before opening night.

That is what broadcast data has to keep up with. The schedule was published in July. The answer to where you can watch it was still being written this week.

If your platform needs to answer that question for hockey fans, game by game and territory by territory, that is the dataset we maintain. Get in touch.