Gary Bettman's NHL Sun Belt Experiment is Dead

Author: Scott Taylor

October 16, 2009

Scott Taylor's E-Take is sponsored every Friday by Manitoba Harvest, the global leader in hemp foods & oils, and your online source for natural, sustainable and certified organic hemp food products. www.manitobaharvest.com.

TAMPA, Fla. – The St. Pete Times Forum in downtown Tampa is a wonderful hockey rink.  It has 19,758 seats, 72 luxury suites (28 of them just 20 rows from ice level) and the beautiful Channelside Club.  No matter where you sit in this building, it’s a good seat.  The location of the building is outstanding, right downtown on the Tampa Bay channel.  There are lots of hotel rooms nearby, plenty of parking and some great restaurants in the neighborhood.  This is the ideal NHL building.

Meanwhile, nobody works harder to sell tickets than the National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lightning.  They currently have a $44 deal that includes two tickets, two hot dogs, two beers (or sodas) and a parking pass.  They also have a special truck that drives all over the Tampa Bay area, full of games and spots for players to sign autographs and plenty of TV monitors to show highlights.  It even has a wireless ticket-selling device.  It’s a great marketing tool and demonstrates the club’s commitment to selling hockey in a tough, non-traditional market.  Too bad all this effort seems to be for nought.

This past Monday night, the Lightning played a tremendous hockey game.  They came from behind and beat their cross-state rivals, the Florida Panthers 3-2.  All the stars got into the act.  Steven Stamkos scored a tremendous goal and assisted on the game winner, captain Vincent Lecavalier had two assists, all-star Marty St. Louis, with a goal and an assist, was the best player on the ice, goalie Antero Nittymaki made two of the biggest saves I’ve ever seen -- especially in October -- and big rookie defenseman Victor Hedman played 25 minutes and showed why he was the No. 2 pick in last summer’s draft.  If you didn’t like this hockey, you will never like hockey.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of people in the Tampa area who don’t really like hockey all that much and they made that pretty clear this past Monday night.  Although the crowd was announced at 14,126, there were barely 7,000 in the building.

Now I understand ‘drop counts.’  That’s the difference between tickets sold and the people who actually show up at the stadium.  Drop counts affect every team in pro sports and there are very few teams (the Minnesota Vikings, Toronto Maple Leafs, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, St. Louis Cardinals are exceptions) who don’t have to worry about ‘drop counts.’  However, I’ve been in the St. Pete Times Forum, the jobbing.com arena in Glendale, Ariz., the Phillips Arena in Atlanta, the Sommet Centre in Nashville and the BankAtlantic Centre near Fort Lauderdale, and in those buildings, drop counts are a way of life. 

Never during the regular season and I mean NEVER, have the announced attendances and the actual bums in the seats been one and the same.  However, I don’t think I’ve seen it as bad as it was on Monday night.

For an explanation of this malaise, I went to my friend Erik Erlendsson, the outstanding hockey reporter for the Tampa Tribune.  Erik just shrugged.  “It’s a Monday night in October against Florida,” he said matter-of-factly.  “For the Lightning opener, they announced 18,000 and there were about 14,000 in here and for Game 2, they announced 14,000 and there were about 10.  Tonight, it’s just what it is.  There is about a 10-11 per cent unemployment rate in this community and people aren’t buying $100 hockey tickets.  “And no matter how hard the NHL tries, they aren’t going to make Florida and Tampa Bay rivals.  It’s a non-existent rivalry.  The Lightning’s rivals are Carolina, the Rangers, Philly, the big American markets.  Not the Florida Panthers.  I mean, really, have you heard of anybody in that Florida lineup?”

Well, David Booth, Bryan McCabe, Gregory Campbell, Radek Dvorak, Jordan Leopold and Cory Stillman, I guess, but not one of those guys would excite me enough to actually buy a ticket.  The fact is the Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup in 2004 and since then have gone right into the tank despite having a trio of the best players in hockey.  Throw in the unemployment rate, the spectacular October weather (I’d much sooner have been on the golf course than at the rink) and the obvious fact that this still is a non-traditional hockey market, and the interest level in the Tampa Bay Lightning doesn’t go much farther than from the building to its flagship AM radio station.

Hockey is a very minor pro sport in the Sun Belt.  Team owners are philanthropists who don’t mind losing wads of cash to brighten the lives of a few fans who live in football towns with great weather.  If the Phoenix Coyotes lost $389 million in the past five years (which they did), I can’t imagine what Tampa, Atlanta, Nashville and Florida have lost.

Gary Bettman’s Southern Experiment is dead.  Bring the NHL back to Canada where it belongs.  End this charade.
 

« Back