CM Punk - turning WWE fans into NHL viewers and hurting Raw's ratings in the process?

In a fun insight into the real-life banter between the top two full time WWE superstars, John Cena recently lost a $1 bet to CM Punk when the Chicago Blackhawks defeated the Boston Bruins to win the Stanley Cup Finals, which led to the amusing photograph seen above. Later Punk was seen posing with the Stanley Cup, proving how it pays to be a local celebrity. What could be the harm in this?

Well, in the crazy cult like environment of the WWE creative team headed by Vince McMahon, which is obsessed with the power of social media and needs to explain away recent sluggish ratings, CM Punk's constant ice hockey chatter has been astonishingly blamed by some for converting WWE fans into NHL turncoats that would rather watch Stanley Cup matches instead of Monday Night Raw.

I'm not making this up, as Dave Meltzer had the strange scoop in this week's subscriber only Wrestling Observer Newsletter:

"Speaking of Punk, one person in the company commented that the 6/24 Raw rating was hurt partially due to Punk. It was said as in facetious in the sense we all know it means nothing but people in the company were talking like it did. The idea was that because he was tweeting so much about the Chicago Blackhawks and the Stanley Cup, and went to so many of their games, that it turned wrestling fans who weren’t hockey fans into NHL fans, and with how great the series was, it caught on. The NHL final game absolutely hurt the Raw rating, but the idea that is was due to C.M. Punk on Twitter is pretty ridiculous. Believe me, I’ve heard every crazy excuse for a show not drawing or ratings being down or why wrestling isn’t as popular, but this was way up there."

So there you have it Cagesiders, the latest bizarre symptom of the horror of working for the McMahon family - thinking that WWE superstars can stop their viewers from watching their programming by talking about other sports on Twitter.