Will Fans Return After NHL Lockout? History Says Yes. Tim Kiska Has the Stats.

By Tim Kiska

The National Hockey League lockout has ended and teams are back on the ice for real this weekend.

The Red Wings began their shortened season Saturday night in St. Louis with a 6-0 loss to the Blues.

The players are tuned up, the Zambonis are ready and “Hockey Night In Canada” will be back on the air.

As the talks continued spasmodically throughout fall, barroom sports analysts argued that the owners must have feared a fan revolt. There will be blood, they said, furiously, on talk radio. Surely, went the reasoning, the risk of alienating the fan base must have been somewhere in Gary Bettman’s calculus. The day of reckoning would soon arrive. Didn’t these guys learn anything from the 2004-05 debacle? 

You may remember 2004-05. NHL owners locked out the players for an entire season, the only time in the history of professional sports that owners snuffed an entire year.

The answer is: Yes, the owners learned something. They learned that fans still come back, even after enduring the insult of a cancelled season. 

Here’s the proof:

I took the four-year average of the home season attendance of all 30 NHL teams for four years – 2000-2001, 2001-02, 2002-03, and 2003-04. This method helps smooth out any single-year surge a team might enjoy at the box office. Then, I punched in 2005-06 home season attendance figures, the first post-lockout year.

Here’s the chart:

Source: Attendance figures at ESPN site. 

* Atlanta's team later became the Winnipeg Jets.

• You’ll see a gain of nearly 400,000 fans – meaning 400,000 more fans went to the games in the first post-lockout year than in the pre-lockout years. That’s a 1.9-percent hike. The Red Wings reported a 2-percent drop – not significant, since the pre-lockout numbers includes the team’s 2001-02 win under Scotty Bowman.

• Twenty-one of the 30 franchises saw increases – some of them pretty hefty. The five Canadian teams accounted for 286,000 of the 400,000 fan boost. None of the Canadian teams lost attendance. 

• Of the teams that lost at the box office, St. Louis was the worst, taking a 25 percent haircut. The fan revolt may have had more to do with the team’s worst-in-the-NHL 21-46 record than any grand statement about the NHL’s labor problems. Ditto for four of the other teams – Chicago, Washington, the New York Islanders and the Columbus Blue Jackets. All four underachievers were in the bottom one-third of the league. 

• Fans continued where they left off with their pre-lockout teams. Teams that traditionally enjoyed capacity crowds, Montreal, Detroit and Philly for instance, continued to enjoy their status. Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup in 2003-04. When the lockout ended, the team got a 26.2 percent boost in attendance.

Home attendance doesn’t tell us everything. And a lot of things can drive crowds. A new arena can boost attendance for five years, according to one study. Attendance reports can also be suspect, since the numbers can occasionally include freebies and discounts.
In addition, it’s only one of many revenue streams for a team. But it’s a big stream – more like a major river, actually. And it tells us how the fans actually feel.

The numbers pretty much tell us that fans did not revolt after 2004-05. And there’s little reason to believe anything else will happen this time around.

Tim Kiska is a former reporter for the Detroit News and Free Press,  an associate professor of journalism at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and an expert in polling and statistical analysis.