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Greatness=PavelDatsyuk

Atlanta's Attendance Last Night

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Official numbers out of Phoenix tonight. 4-2 Coyotes get the win. Attendance at the Jobing.com Arena: 6,706

ouch...

Just driving the point home that these teams need to migrate to the great white north... as already covered, give Winnipeg their Jets back and move Atlanta to Quebec to start...

as a side note, I really miss this jersey:

home_jersey-1992_big3.jpg

Edited by stevkrause

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Hockey can and does work in the South when you have a winning team and reasonably priced tickets. The Louisiana IceGators in the booming metropolis of Lafayette (I consider myself pretty good with geography and I'd have a hard time finding Lafayette, LA on a map) averaged 11K+ paid attendance for a couple years in the late 90s when they were flagrantly violating the ECHL salary cap, and consequently winning games left and right.

I think at the end of the day, it's not the south that's the issue, it's the markets they chose... I don't think they did their due diligence before putting teams down there - Tampa Bay, Dallas and Carolina(hate them by the way, so it sucks to admit it) have all been very viable markets, but South Beach, Phoenix and Atlanta were poor choices and even with winning teams, would just be fads anyway with no sustainable fanbase and as soon as the teams started losing again, the fans would leave (see Florida after making it to the SCF and losing all their fans within 2 years after)

The fact of the matter is, more teams belong in Canada one way or another and it simply makes poor business sense to keep trying to cram a square peg in a round hole, when you have markets foaming at the mouth to pay obscene amounts of money for your product that you're trying to sell to people who don't want it... as the old saying goes - go where the money is.

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Hockey can and does work in the South when you have a winning team and reasonably priced tickets. The Louisiana IceGators in the booming metropolis of Lafayette (I consider myself pretty good with geography and I'd have a hard time finding Lafayette, LA on a map) averaged 11K+ paid attendance for a couple years in the late 90s when they were flagrantly violating the ECHL salary cap, and consequently winning games left and right.

A) An NHL team isn't going to be able to get away with cap-breaking

B) Said salary cap is meant to even the playing field among teams. Most teams bounce around all over the place in terms of performance now, if having a winning team is the make-or-break element of a team's success you're essentially admitting inconsistency at best.

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Maybe it was a Halloween promotion: if you came dressed up as an empty seat, your ticket was half price.

Funny you say that, Darren Dreger just retweeted this:

BizNasty2point0 morning folks. Guess we actually had more then 5000 fans for our game. Didn't realize it was dress like a seat night. Close to a sell out.

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Yup - pretty neat/unique jersey.

For what it's worth - if a team were to move back to Quebec City they could still play in the old Colisee Pepsi (capacity 15,176) for a few seasons until a new arena was built.

They could - but they won't.

Seems to me Bettman will delay a move to Canada for as long as he can. Right now, all he's got to keep a team out of Quebec City is the arena issue.

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Corporate Winnipeg ready to support NHL team

The Sun contacted about one-third of the luxury suite holders at MTS Centre, and 17 of the 25 executives we reached said they would renew their suites at our predicted NHL price, which is triple the current rate.

Stars ask NHL for revenue advance

The sources again confirmed that the team is being financed by the group of lenders who are acting as the unofficial owners after Hicks Sports Group defaulted on $525 million in debt that helped purchase and run the Stars and the Rangers.
Edited by kook_10

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I 100% agree with you and mindfly on this, I think those teams would thrive today in the Canadian locations. Not to mention the economics behind it, not only are tickets not selling in current locations, there not selling at about a fraction of the price they'd sell for in the canadian market (which isn't soo lousy these days)

the first step to this happening is Bettman getting cut loose by the league. he needs to go for these teams to go. he'll die trying to prove that hockey is viable in southern USA where there may be a handful of hockey fans, but not enough to support an NHL franchise. i don't believe anymore that the Jets will be back here until Bettman is gone and someone without tunnel vision is running the NHL.

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Out of all the teams in the league... why LA I wonder...

Seattle could build a nice local thing with Vancouver. I really don't get why there isn't a team there.

Oh and the city size thing, check metropolitan areas, Atlanta is kinda big :P

Ohhh, that would explain it! I thought 3 million people seemed a little low for LA, for example...

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Agreed, plus it's just not that big a city! I don't know why, but I always considered it to be one of the major metropolitan areas of the South, but as of 2009, Atlanta is the 33rd largest city in the U.S. El Paso, which is the most random-ass place I can think of, is #22, for pete's sake. For that matter, Seattle, which might actually have some hockey fans in the vicinity, is in 23rd place (10 spots ahead of ATL) and has 100k more people than Atlanta, yet we keep on putting teams in the South for the sake of some kind of Manifest Hockey Destiny. Ridiculous.

You were thinking right before and you must have looked at population numbers for Atlanta proper and not the metro area. Atlanta is, in fact the 9th largest metro area in the united states. Atlanta itself has less then 1 million population, but the metro area has a population of almost 6 million. It's not that Atlanta doesn't have the population to support these teams it's because people for whatever reason simply choose not to support their teams unless of course it's the Georgia bull dogs football team. As an Atlanta resident (moved here from Michigan 7 years ago) I will definitely confirm that the state of the economy has had a big effect on us here. Anyways I'll be going to see the wings play the thrashers in November and I'm sure it'll be 70% wings fans to 30% thrashers. Lol

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Projected attendance: the players wives/girlfriends, a hobo who wandered in off the streets and a set of local radio contest winners who were told it was an MLS game

:lol:

I live in Texas, and I think hockey doesn't belong south of the Mason-Dixon line, personally. Expansion teams... bleah. <_<

Move 'em all back to Canada. :cool:

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Projected attendance: the players wives/girlfriends, a hobo who wandered in off the streets and a set of local radio contest winners who were told it was an MLS game

Don't forget the 3-4 creepy unattractive groupies sitting right behind the players bench who like Evander Kane just a little bit TOO much... :lol:

Edited by _Kabrok_

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Funny thing, I was down in Atlanta this past week for work. The guy I was down there with, and I went to that game, and yeah, it was crazy empty. I was about 20 rows behind the bench and the tickets cost $120. Maybe if they lowered their ticket prices a bit people would start going more.

That and for anyone from the ATL area I couldn't find the damn centennial deck for the life of me.

Edited by Dave

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