No more Canucks on Pay-Per-View

Some good news from the Vancouver Canucks today:

The Vancouver Canucks in partnership with Rogers Sportsnet announced today that they have reached a three-year agreement to broadcast 13 regular season games a year on Rogers Sportsnet ONE, beginning in the 2010.11 National Hockey League season.

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This new partnership is in addition to Rogers Sportsnet Pacific’s 45 game Canucks broadcast schedule available to fans in British Columbia and the Yukon Territories. This is another extension of the strong strategic alliance with Rogers Communications.

A little bit more info about Rogers Sportsnet ONE here.

A quick look at the Canucks’ schedule this upcoming 2010/2011 season shows 15 games on Saturday night. Assuming these Saturday night games will be broadcast on Hockey Night in Canada – and I think most, if not all of them, should be – that’s a total of 73(-ish) games to be broadcast potentially on CBC, Rogers Sportsnet Pacific and Rogers Sportsnet ONE. TSN showed 10 Canucks games last season so it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that TSN can pick up the remaining games. City-TV, another Rogers property, also broadcasted 1 game last season; I noticed Shaw added City-TV HD to its channel lineup not too long ago.

So what does this all mean?

The Canucks have always maintained that the only reason games were available only on pay-per-view was because they didn’t have a network to broadcast the games for them. And now that they do, well, simply, it’s no more pay-per-view.