Harris: Why It's So Hard to Get The Truth About Attendance Figures At Red Wings Games

The author, a regular contributor to Deadline Detroit, is a freelance writer and former reporter for the Detroit News. 

 

By Paul Harris

 

The last season the Red Wings played at Joe Louis Arena, ending in 2017, lower bowl tickets ranged in price from $92 to $120. Just two years later, in their glitzy new taxpayer-subsidized home at Little Caesars Arena, those same tickets go for $100 to $330.

 

Thousands are empty at game time, and remain so throughout three periods of play. That is also the case at the games of LCA’s other main tenant, the NBA’s Detroit Pistons.

 

The sight is so jarring on television that this past December, the arena’s managers, Olympia Entertainment, began replacing the arena’s red seats with less conspicuous black ones, at a considerable expense that they’re not officially revealing. (The originals were $3.5 million, so that’s probably a good estimate.)

 

Think about that for a moment. A brand-new arena is getting even newer seating to avoid pointing out what every fan already knows: The Wings are playing at a less than mediocre level (understandable in what all acknowledge is a rebuilding year), and ticket prices are way out of line (understandable for an $863 million sports palace). Those who would go downtown under any circumstances, because live games are fun, are content to try their luck on the internet, where you can score tickets for a far more reasonable $20.

 

And what is Olympia’s media strategy around this conundrum? Silence. And fun with numbers.

 

For the record, “officially” – according to the NHL attendance report – all 41 Red Wings home games were sellouts last season with the average of 19,515 being the capacity for hockey at LCA. That’s only down slightly this season with an average of 19,502 per game, 97.6 percent of capacity.

 

The “official” average attendance in 2016-17, the last season at Joe Louis Arena, was 20,027, a stretch, but it doesn’t seem to be as much as the current “official” numbers.

Those numbers, provided by each NHL team to the league, reflects tickets sold. But attendance figures for individual teams are rarely checked for accuracy by any outside or impartial source and, in some cases, have long been suspect. That goes for every team in each major sport, including the NBA.

According to the NBA attendance report, the Pistons are averaging 15,961 per game this season, 76 percent of the arena’s 20,491 seating capacity for basketball. Last season it was 17,413 and 82.9 percent.

Teams have various strategies to artificially boost attendance figures, mainly by giving tickets away -- in generous quantities -- to sponsors and charities, and by comping visiting-team players to the tune of four or eight per player, per game. All these seats are counted as sales whether or not anyone shows up to sit in the seats. 

 

When asked about the Red Wings' vacancies, the folks at Olympia didn’t even try to spin it. They just declined comment.

 

I was told by a person high in the organization that Olympia Entertainment President and CEO Tom Wilson would be the best person to talk to on such a story. That made sense.

Wilson gets much of the credit for his behind-the-scenes work in getting Little Caesars Arena built, just as he did with the Palace of Auburn Hills when he was the President and CEO of Palace Sports & Entertainment for 22 years.  

And Wilson – who I’ve known since covering the Palace-owned Detroit Vipers of the International Hockey League and the Pistons in the mid-to-late ‘90’s – seemed to have no problem talking about the story and told me to just call him at his office.

I did so. When we finally connected, he told me that he – the organization’s president and CEO – needed the okay of even higher-ranking executives in the Ilitch organization to talk to the media. He gave me the name and number of Brett McWethy, director of marketing communications. And McWethy ultimately declined Deadline Detroit’s request, saying that because there was no “deadline date” for the story, the organization would “not take this opportunity” to allow any of its employees to be interviewed.

 

To not even allow Wilson – one of the most experienced, smoothest and most practiced media interview subjects in the area – to speak about the subject of attendance at Little Caesars Arena says something.

 

Actually, that says everything.