People are waiting for the great battle between Kobe and LeBron to take place in the NBA Finals, but there has already been a battle between the two biggest superstars in their sport.

Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins took out Alexander Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals in seven games in the National Hockey League’s conference semifinals. In that series, three games went to overtime, and Crosby and Ovechkin went head to head, scoring 13 and 14 points, respectively.

Not many people watched it. Then again, not many people got the chance to. The NHL is almost entirely relegated to the Versus network, with a select few games broadcast nationally on NBC and on certain regional sports networks.

Considering that three of the four conference semifinal series went to seven games and the fourth went to six, sports fans are missing out on some great action… assuming they care about hockey, anyway.

Hockey is more popular in certain regions than in others. Football is king in Oklahoma, for example, with basketball in a distant, but strong second. It gets somewhat cold here in the winter, but not enough to be able to play hockey on frozen ponds as they can do up north. Junior hockey leagues flourish up there and create interest in the game, akin to what high school and college football does here. The only strong hockey influences in this area would be the OKC Blazers and OU’s hockey team, neither of which have anything close to the following that football has.

Hockey has a lot of appeal to it, though. It’s as fast as basketball, as physical as football (if not more so), it has an atmosphere in the arenas unlike anything else in professional sports, and it has the capability to energize a fan base. Detroit is a good example of this: the city is mostly miserable at the moment, with jobs being lost, the Lions being terrible on a historic level, and the Pistons getting obliterated by the Cavs in four games in the first round of the NBA playoffs.

The Red Wings, however, are fighting their way to a second straight Stanley Cup, the greatest trophy in sports, and a possible rematch with Crosby and the Penguins in the Cup Finals, who they beat in six in last year’s championship series. That series, between Pittsburgh and Hockeytown itself, had some of the strongest TV ratings since the 1994 finals, when the New York Rangers won the Cup.

The outdoor games that the NHL has done the last couple of years on New Year’s Day have gotten the league more notice as well. 2008’s game at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo, NY between the Penguins and the Buffalo Sabres, as well as 2009’s match at iconic Wrigley Field in Chicago this year between the Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks, got relatively high ratings, even against college football’s swarm of bowl games on New Year’s.

The NHL needs to get back on ESPN or another major sports network in the worst way. Not everybody has Versus and they can’t market a sport if the fans can’t watch it. Look at the NBA, for example. It’s not on ESPN every night, but it’s on TNT otherwise, and a lot of people were watching TNT for the epic Celtics-Bulls series in the opening round. And this year’s Stanley Cup finals will only have the first two games of the series and the last three on NBC. No game in any major sports championship should be on anything less than a broadcast network.

When their current TV agreement expires in 2011, the NHL needs to at least get back onto ESPN2 for some of their games, including having all of their playoff games on ESPN2 and NBC, leaving some room on Versus for regular season games. The NHL also needs to market its superstars and great teams much better than it is now. Another Crosby-Ovechkin series could give the NHL a lot more of the exposure it needs.

That is, if anyone knows it’s on TV.