Detroit Red Wings
The local NHL franchise, Red Wings, had their season and home openner tonight versus last year's Stanley Cup Champion, who also knocked us out of the playoffs last year: the Ducks of Anaheim. Given that information, do you think we sold-out the Joe? Nope, we didn't. Only got 17,610 tickets sold out of a possible 20,000 tickets. That's only 88% of tickets SOLD. That's not actual attendance, mind you; it doesn't tell us how many butts were in the seats but just how many butts could have been in the seats. Why is this a bad figure? I'll posit some theories.
1) Tickets are too expensive. Forget all those stupid statistics on the Internet: the average cost of a Red Wings ticket last season was NOT $43.13. I find it very hard to believe that in a stadium where most of the seating (upper bowl, nose-bleed) starts at $54 and only goes up from there, that the average is somehow lower.
While at least these retards are using the same standard to measure ALL sports clubs in ALL sports (as in, they are being consistent so as to measure against other clubs), the formula they use is way off base (as in, they are not accurate). Don't feed me bullshit about how you took a weighted average of how many tickets they sold over the course of a year and then divide that by the number of maximum seats they could have sold multiplied by the ratio of over-fucking-priced-beers-to-urinal-cakes.
Just do a freaking median or straight average. Arrange the ticket prices in order of high to low and tell us what the middle number is. And don't count the luxury boxes: the ones that make enough to sit in those things don't give a shit about the median ticket price.
2) Illitch owns more than one sports team. Yeah, you forgot he owned the Tigers too, didn't you? You know, the baseball club that went to the World Series last year? This year they broke the 3 million ticket sales mark. Even if you use the cheapest seat prices that means he's pulling in alone - at least - $15 million per year not including concessions. Add in merchandise and TV rights and you have a good meal ticket. Anyways, our next point is very similar.
3) Baseball is cheap and popular. When you have a team that finally turned in a winning season for the first time in over a decade, and then head to the World Series, you can be damn sure people will WANT to see them and tickets will be hard to find for weekend games. And why are tickets sparse in a stadium that holds 40,000 people per game? Because they're cheap! The most expensive tickets you can buy (aside from the Bourgeoisie luxury boxes) is $65 for right behind home plate and down the lines. That's only $11 more than an upper-bowl, squint-so-you-can-see ticket at a Wings game. That and its much more beautiful weather when baseball is played compared to the snow and slush and finger-numbing cold you have to put up with to see a hockey game.
4) Joe Louis Arena sucks. Sure, it's on the large side in terms of capacity versus other hockey arenas but whats all the extra seating when you can't fill them? Not only that but they built it in a horrible place. It's surrounded by concrete and water, an island of ice. Just try and find a direct walkable route to it and you'll be hard-pressed. Ok, so you can walk along the river to the rear entrance along a seldom used service drive or you can walk up a few flights and down a few escalators and through some corridors to get there from Cobo or you can try and run across the Lodge or take the hamster tunnels or WHATEVER. Point is, it is isolated from downtown. With Comerica Park and Ford Field, at least before and after the game you can wander around downtown and hit up the few bars and clubs we have. Can't really do that with JLA.
5) Sick of high prices. So now that the strike has enforced salary caps for teams we would expect ticket prices to come down, right? Nope. See, the owners were losing money before the lockout, except they realized that they'd be losing LESS money if they told they players, "Have fun playing hockey, but don't play it in my, or any of my other 29 friends' hockey arenas." So I guess owners are back to losing money for a couple of years until inflation catches up and they start making profit? I don't know.
6) Michigan's economy sucks. If I had a few weeks off work, I would go poll all the NHL clubs about their ticket prices, get unemployment data from the goverment about communities that are 30 miles within the arena, get the median income of those ZIP codes, how the team did last year, and the team's salary and see if I can't find something out. Once I have that data, I can make everyone realize that the Wings are playing in a state with the highest unemployment rate in the country. Still, so are the Lions, Tigers, and Pistons but I don't think anyone is complaining about their attendance or lack of fervor. Maybe it's that..
7) We got tired of winning. Face it, when it comes to hockey, we've been spoiled for the past 15 years. Countless numbers of future hall of famers have played on our team: Steve Yzerman, Nick Lidstrom, Hasek, Mike Vernon, Robert Lang, Chris Chelios, Sergei Fedorov, Larry Murphy, Matt Schneider, Brett Hull, and others I'm sure. We've witnessed one of the most heated rivalries bloodily come and bloodily go before our eyes with Claude Lemieux and the Avalanche. We have the longest streak of continuous post-seasons in any professional sport and we have gone to the Stanley Cup finals four times within the last 13 seasons. There's nothing more for us to witness. Nothing more for us to accomplish.
1) Tickets are too expensive. Forget all those stupid statistics on the Internet: the average cost of a Red Wings ticket last season was NOT $43.13. I find it very hard to believe that in a stadium where most of the seating (upper bowl, nose-bleed) starts at $54 and only goes up from there, that the average is somehow lower.
While at least these retards are using the same standard to measure ALL sports clubs in ALL sports (as in, they are being consistent so as to measure against other clubs), the formula they use is way off base (as in, they are not accurate). Don't feed me bullshit about how you took a weighted average of how many tickets they sold over the course of a year and then divide that by the number of maximum seats they could have sold multiplied by the ratio of over-fucking-priced-beers-to-urinal-cakes.
Just do a freaking median or straight average. Arrange the ticket prices in order of high to low and tell us what the middle number is. And don't count the luxury boxes: the ones that make enough to sit in those things don't give a shit about the median ticket price.
2) Illitch owns more than one sports team. Yeah, you forgot he owned the Tigers too, didn't you? You know, the baseball club that went to the World Series last year? This year they broke the 3 million ticket sales mark. Even if you use the cheapest seat prices that means he's pulling in alone - at least - $15 million per year not including concessions. Add in merchandise and TV rights and you have a good meal ticket. Anyways, our next point is very similar.
3) Baseball is cheap and popular. When you have a team that finally turned in a winning season for the first time in over a decade, and then head to the World Series, you can be damn sure people will WANT to see them and tickets will be hard to find for weekend games. And why are tickets sparse in a stadium that holds 40,000 people per game? Because they're cheap! The most expensive tickets you can buy (aside from the Bourgeoisie luxury boxes) is $65 for right behind home plate and down the lines. That's only $11 more than an upper-bowl, squint-so-you-can-see ticket at a Wings game. That and its much more beautiful weather when baseball is played compared to the snow and slush and finger-numbing cold you have to put up with to see a hockey game.
4) Joe Louis Arena sucks. Sure, it's on the large side in terms of capacity versus other hockey arenas but whats all the extra seating when you can't fill them? Not only that but they built it in a horrible place. It's surrounded by concrete and water, an island of ice. Just try and find a direct walkable route to it and you'll be hard-pressed. Ok, so you can walk along the river to the rear entrance along a seldom used service drive or you can walk up a few flights and down a few escalators and through some corridors to get there from Cobo or you can try and run across the Lodge or take the hamster tunnels or WHATEVER. Point is, it is isolated from downtown. With Comerica Park and Ford Field, at least before and after the game you can wander around downtown and hit up the few bars and clubs we have. Can't really do that with JLA.
5) Sick of high prices. So now that the strike has enforced salary caps for teams we would expect ticket prices to come down, right? Nope. See, the owners were losing money before the lockout, except they realized that they'd be losing LESS money if they told they players, "Have fun playing hockey, but don't play it in my, or any of my other 29 friends' hockey arenas." So I guess owners are back to losing money for a couple of years until inflation catches up and they start making profit? I don't know.
6) Michigan's economy sucks. If I had a few weeks off work, I would go poll all the NHL clubs about their ticket prices, get unemployment data from the goverment about communities that are 30 miles within the arena, get the median income of those ZIP codes, how the team did last year, and the team's salary and see if I can't find something out. Once I have that data, I can make everyone realize that the Wings are playing in a state with the highest unemployment rate in the country. Still, so are the Lions, Tigers, and Pistons but I don't think anyone is complaining about their attendance or lack of fervor. Maybe it's that..
7) We got tired of winning. Face it, when it comes to hockey, we've been spoiled for the past 15 years. Countless numbers of future hall of famers have played on our team: Steve Yzerman, Nick Lidstrom, Hasek, Mike Vernon, Robert Lang, Chris Chelios, Sergei Fedorov, Larry Murphy, Matt Schneider, Brett Hull, and others I'm sure. We've witnessed one of the most heated rivalries bloodily come and bloodily go before our eyes with Claude Lemieux and the Avalanche. We have the longest streak of continuous post-seasons in any professional sport and we have gone to the Stanley Cup finals four times within the last 13 seasons. There's nothing more for us to witness. Nothing more for us to accomplish.