Quote:
Originally Posted by transplant99
Just because seats are empty, doesn't mean they werent sold.
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I get that certain seats are sold and nobody shows up, or they're sold to some large corperation and the tickets then aren't sold from there.
But there's definitly something fishy about our sellout streak. Those nosebleeds have had many games where they are 2/3's empty for the past few years. I'm not sure if it's both sides or just one. If it's one side that's about 700 seats empty, if the other side is the same it's 1400 seats empty.
When you have blocks of hundreds of seats empty, it moves from "You realize that just because a seat is empty doesn't mean it wasn't sold, right?" territory, into "There's no way anyone's paying the Flames tens of thousands of dollars for hundreds and hundreds of empty blocks of seats and then not using/reselling them" territory.
The more likely scenario is the Flames are using some creative accounting to "sell" the seats for nothing, so they can keep the sellout streak alive and therefore keep up the illusion that tickets are in high demand and hard to come by.
Colorado did the same thing for years and had the leagues longest sellout streak because of it, until people started questioning why entire blocks of seats were empty. Once people started digging, the sellout streak mysteriously ended immediatly, and their attendance drastically dropped to like 13000 a game.
Based on ticket that are available right up until game time for non exciting games, and the lack of fans in the nosebleeds, I'd estimate our average attendance is closer to 17500, then 19289. With premium games being close to a sellout and crappy, weekday games being closer to the 16500-17000 range.
