Obviously, all of the attendance figures I use are essentially the number of tickets paid for on that night. Because as I showed you with some pictures from Phoenix, there is no way some of the reported amounts from the lower-end teams are true. But, at the same time, I do believe some teams are much more truthful in their reporting of attendances than others. So I went through team by team and put them into one of three groups; Liars, truth, and the ones I cant quite put my finger on (not sure). So here's the list:
Liars
- Atlanta
- Florida
- New Jersey
- New York Rangers
- New York Islanders
- Phoenix
- Tampa Bay
Telling the "Truth" (two at a time to save post length)
- Boston - Buffalo
- Calgary - Chicago
- Colorado - Detroit
- Edmonton - Los Angeles
- Minnesota - Montreal
- Nashville - Ottawa
- Philadelphia - Pittsburgh
- San Jose - St. Louis
- Toronto - Vancouver
- Washington
Hard to tell
- Anaheim
- Carolina
- Columbus
- Dallas
Either way, why did I do this? Well, its really irrelevant because if the New York Rangers have every seat sold, then more power to them! That means the marketing and sales group members are doing their job by getting the tickets sold. I mean there are advantages to lying about a sellout, I guess. An example would be to keep an historic sellout streak or to attract sponsors. But when MSG announces "another sellout" when there are blatantly hundreds of seats open in the 100 sections, what does that say about the organization?
I don't know, none of this really matters when it comes down to it because its all about just getting the tickets sold. Either way, I wanted to get this straight because of the 9 teams I mentioned before (NJ, PHO, LA, NASH, NYI, CAR, FLA, ATL, CLB), only 3 seem to be telling the truth (LA, NASH, and CAR).
Finally, this weeks statistics...
Average Crowd per game this week: 17,659. Nice.
Total Sellouts this week: 24 out of 41 total games. 59% - Great work.
We will see how big the Holiday bump ends up being after next week.
That's all for tonight, I'm on the road until tommorow afternoon, I'll wrap up tonight's stuff tommorow night.
The lower bowl of MSG (sections 100 and down) is mostly all corporate seats - a lot of them are bought up by companies for their execs to use, who don't always show up or bother selling the tickets. In fact, after a game last week I met a guy at the train station who had seats 2 rows back off the glass...he "didn't feel like going."
ReplyDeleteI can't say that's the case for every empty seat down there, but it's definitely a majority of them. Most nights the seats from the 200 level and up are packed, though.
Just found this site - I'm diggin' it, you're doing good work so far