New York, a Hockey Town At Last?

Remember when the Rangers played the Sabres in the playoffs last spring and, even though the New York TV market is about a dozen times larger, more people watched the series in Buffalo? (Look in the second item of the column I just linked to.) It's amazing but true: in every game of that series, roughly 50 percent more people watched the NBC, MSG and Versus telecasts in Buffalo than in New York.

Those days are over. Versus reports that viewership of its Monday night Rangers-Sabres telecast was far larger in New York than in Buffalo. According to Meier Ravich, a spokesman for the network, the game on March 10 averaged 104,000 households in New York against 65,000 households in Buffalo