Attendance decline leaves Jets vulnerable to uncertain future

When the NHL finally abandoned its 30-year quest to make pro hockey viable in the Arizona desert, one obvious conclusion was that the league had wasted a lot of time and effort wooing a market resistant to its charms.

The related part of the story was that commissioner Gary Bettman's laser focus on expansion in the American South ignored swathes of the country that he could've counted on to welcome top-level hockey with open arms. Or any hockey, really.

I know because I made some of those arguments myself: Why keep trying to cram a square peg into a round hole when there remained markets in Canada desperate to add an NHL franchise? Some even had arenas in place!

Recent events in Winnipeg, though, have at least given pause to this line of thinking. As much as it pains to concede something to the world's most condescending commissioner, Bettman might've, just maybe, had a point.

The Winnipeg Jets are having attendance issues. To be clear, these aren't Arizona-style attendance problems, with their vast sections of empty seats game after game, or even the shorter-term issues that have cropped up in Sun Belt markets like Carolina and Florida in the recent past.

The Jets are still popular. But what was once the hottest ticket in town, with the team selling 13,000 season-ticket packages within minutes of them going on sale in 2011 after the team relocated from Atlanta, is now closer to lukewarm. The average attendance at the Canada Life Centre is a little under 14,000 through 15 games, or third lowest in the NHL behind only the rebuilding San Jose Sharks and the Utah Hockey Club, which can cram just over 11,000 fans into its building for now because the Delta Center was designed for basketball, not hockey.

The Jets are also playing to just over 90% capacity, better than only seven teams in the league. That's not disastrous, but a little alarming when the Jets started the season white-hot and won 22 of their first 32 games, tops in the league. Most of those clubs with wide-open spaces in the rafters also languish near the bottom of the standings.

(As a point of comparison, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers averaged more than 31,000 fans for home dates at Princess Auto Stadium.)

It's also worrisome when it's been well-known for a while now that the team has struggled to put enough bums in seats. Bettman alighted on Winnipeg last year to make clear that the attendance figures concern the league. Ownership went on an unusual media blitz to explain that they had perhaps taken the ticket-buying public for granted following the boom times of the Jets' return to Manitoba.

Bettman went to some length to explain that the franchise wasn't at a crisis point and that he still viewed Winnipeg as a "strong NHL market," but that gentle note of worry didn't spark a stampede to the turnstiles. Put simply, the Jets play in a small market, which means less room for error.

A report in the Winnipeg Free Press last week said the Jets have about 10,000 season-ticket holders, up from last season's record low of 9,500 but still well short of the 13,000 the league and ownership believe is required to keep the team sustainable. The Free Press also reported that corporate sales account for only 20% of the existing season-ticket base, a number that's closer to 50% for a lot of franchises. One of the more surprising quotes in that article came from the president of the Business Council of Manitoba, who said it's "incumbent on big and small and medium-sized enterprises to play their part" in supporting their community by supporting the Jets.

Is it, though? Businesses of any size had more than a decade to assess the value of Jets tickets as an expense, and the Jets themselves are a for-profit enterprise. Asking companies to support the franchise isn't like asking them to donate to the local food bank.

It's also possible Jets fans are taking a bit of a wait-and-see approach to a team that, while generally competitive, hasn't seen much postseason success. When playoff hockey finally returned to Winnipeg a decade ago, almost 20 years after the original Jets had decamped for Phoenix, the arena was thunderously loud. Then-coach Paul Maurice spoke about how random people would approach him in the grocery store and thank him for being part of the reborn franchise.

But the Jets were swept in that series and missed the playoffs in the following two seasons. The team has managed just three series wins in the 10 years since that postseason return.

You can see why fans might be a little leery about investing in the Jets: monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise.

There's a good chance all of this will eventually be worked out. One of the side effects of having a high demand for tickets, as the Jets had for years, is that people get used to thinking they're unattainable.

That is plainly no longer the case, even as the Jets have re-signed their star players and started this season on a 15-1 heater.

Good seats, as they say, are available.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.