Cablevision-Comcast Face-Off

In Manhattan, street teams, adorned in New York Rangers jerseys, stopped and held face-offs on sidewalks to draw interest in the Blueshirts and their Game 7 battle tonight against the Washington Capitals in their opening round National Hockey League playoff series.

The concluding Eastern conference quarterfinal contest in the Verizon Center also represents a face-off between Cablevision Systems Corp., which owns the team and MSG, and the nation’s top cable operator, whose Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic will televise the action in the Washington D.C. and Baltimore areas.

While both games figure to draw big RSN numbers on April 28, relative to NHL ratings, the winning team’s RSN will also get to earn a couple more of telecasts in the second round — Comcast-owned national carrier Versus doesn’t skate exclusively until the NHL conference finals.

Through four contests (NBC aired the second and sixth games), the Rangers-Capitals averaged a 2.37 household rating in the New York DMA, an 11% rise over the 2.13 household mark for the Blueshirts playoff run in 2008, according to Nielsen Media Research data.

In DC, the four Capitals-Rangers contests scored a 2.7 household average for CSN Mid-Atlantic, translating into 63,200 households in the nation’s capital. Tacking on viewers in Baltimore, CSN Mid-Atlantic executives said the RSN pulled 81,000 households.

Should the Capitals and Alexander Ovechkin win, Comcast SportsNets will bat .500 with the NHL’s opening round: CSN Philadelphia  (Comcast owns the Flyers) and CSN Bay Area (San Jose Sharks, which had the league’s best regular-season record) have seen their clubs fall through the ice in upsets. CSN Chicago, meanwhile, is enjoying the Blackhawks’ resurgence, with record NHL ratings. Chicago, which eliminated Calgary last night, takes on another Versus-Nielsen-unfriendly Canadian club in Vancouver next.

For Cablevision, Rangers-Capitals at 7 p.m. isn’t the only game in town tonight. New York area fans will have to be as quick with their remotes as Martin Brodeur is with the glove: the New Jersey Devils will engage in their own Game 7 versus the Carolina Panthers tonight at the Prudential Center in Newark. MSG Plus — which averaged a 1.31 rating in the New York DMA with the series thus far, up 122% from last year’s Devils’ post-season average –has the action.

For its part, Versus, which stands to lose viewers in round two if both New York-area squads end up on the what-if end of the seventh games, will be cycling between the action.

Updated: The executives in Bethpage and Penn Plaza wound up on the wrong end of the Game 7 body checks: both the Rangers and Devils lost by one goal.  Brodeur, the NHL’s all-time winning goaltender, surrendered the tying goal with 1:20 remaining and the game-winner with 48 seconds left.