Quote:
Originally Posted by polak
Percentage wise is a stupid way to look at it?
So if someone played in a 40,000 seat arena and managed to fill 20,000 seats, in your eyes they have worse attendance than someone who fills a 19,000 seat arena?
The ticket price thing is valid but it shows that there is at least interest in the team. The market might just not be able to support higher prices.
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I agree with you in principal on this, % wise isn't really a good measure in general for the reason you pointed out. However, it's probably pretty applicable in the NHL because with the exception of Winnipeg, not really that big a difference in building sizes. Most are over 18K and under 20K. Again, I know there are some exceptions, most notably Winnipeg on the small side, but attendance % likely isn't painting a picture that is that far off reality for attendance in the NHL.
But as said before, attendance alone doesn't even come close to telling the story. Really, all you need to look at is revenue generated by the teams, that's your best high level metric on success of a market place. From there you can dive deeper on the different driver metrics to understand what's actually going on in each market good or bad, but people using Attendance as their first line metric to determine market health or viability are starting at the wrong spot IMO.
I also agree that attendance can guage the interest to some level. But it's all relative. The value of a market should be gauged on at what Price people would be willing to still come to games at. A market where you can't give away tickets for free and have people show up, likely the worst market on your scale. A market where you can charge premium prices like in Calgary and still sell out the building to 90% in a rebuild, likely a great market. A market like Toronto where you can have a perennial loser and still charge double the other good markets, likely means you could have another team serving that fan base because supply is way way under demand. And of course everything in between.