A Boston Pizza in Edmonton, in the city that builds its winters around the Oilers, couldn't legally put the Oilers on its televisions Monday night. The game was on. Rogers just wanted to be paid a second time to show it.
⚡ Upset:Red Wings had a 34% chance before puck drop and beat Oilers 4–3.
27%
That one taped-up notice matters less than what it reveals: watching hockey in Canada now takes a subscription spreadsheet. On Monday, October 26, 2026, the Oilers hosted the Detroit Red Wings at Rogers Place, the first of nine Oilers "Monday Night Hockey" games streamed exclusively on Sportsnet+. No traditional TV option. Even people who already pay for the Sportsnet channel through cable couldn't use their login to watch, the way they always had. They had to hand over an extra $12.99 a month, with the only clean workaround being Rogers' own Xfinity TV service. One fan compared it to "buying a gym membership and then being charged again to use the treadmill."
The restaurant looked at the extra fee, decided a Monday wasn't worth it, and declined. A bar owner shouldn't have to eat a surcharge on a slow night to serve a product the broadcaster keeps making more expensive. The sane business decision for the bar leaves Oilers fans standing outside a hockey restaurant in Edmonton unable to watch the Oilers. When the rational move for everyone except Rogers is to not show the game, the system is working as designed, and the design is rotten.
RatingThis didn't fall out of the sky. This is the first season of Rogers' new 12-year, $11-billion deal with the NHL, more than 110 per cent higher than the last one on an annualized basis. Nobody held a gun to Rogers' head to bid that price. Having bid it, Rogers has to claw the money back somewhere, and it's clawing it back from the people who already pay. A direct Sportsnet+ subscriber nets Rogers far more, $35 a month standard and $45 premium, than the roughly $6.50 a month it gets from someone getting Sportsnet through cable. That gap is the entire reason the surcharge exists.
So they built the toll booths. CBC is gone entirely this season, after 74 years of free Saturday-night hockey dating back to 1952. Wednesdays live on Amazon Prime Video. Mondays live behind the Sportsnet+ wall. The playoffs, as announced for this season, are split between Sportsnet and Prime, with Amazon holding exclusive rights to two first-round series and one second-round series. Add it up and seeing everything can run $368.99 a year, or $443.99 with Sportsnet+ premium, on top of whatever cable bill you're already paying.
Go back to 2013, when Rogers first won these rights and its own press release promised more hockey through City, CBC and all its platforms: broader access, more ways in. Thirteen years later, the free-to-air model is dead, CBC is out, and a bar can't afford to turn on the hometown team. They promised broader access and built a paywall instead.
Rogers says it's working with other distributors to add options, so some of this friction may ease as the season goes. It shouldn't have taken a locked-out Boston Pizza to start that conversation. A company that controls the national sport and makes it harder for a neighbourhood bar to put the game on a screen is a landlord. The rent is the point.
