OHL teams saw more fans when Yakupov was playing—but only slightly

The Nail Yakupov drama has been renewed for another season, with the future superstar and Edmonton Oilers' No. 1 overall selection opting to play at home in Neftekhimik this season.

Make no mistake: Yakupov enjoyed his time in Sarnia and, last I heard, is under no threat to stay permanently in the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) and go against his NHL commitments. There's probably something to be said for his development playing against pros rather than in a league he will dominate like the OHL.

I found this quote particularly interesting:

From that, it sounds like the Sting are resigned to giving up on Yakupov. As has been mentioned many, many times before, the Sting already have two imports on the roster.

If I'm the OHL, I change the rule, albeit briefly, to allow for this sort of player transaction but only allow it in exceptional cases, where Sarnia could release Yakupov without the threat of having another team scoop him up on waivers. The OHL has created exceptional statuses for the draft, and while it is in their best interest to keep one of the league's premier players, he probably isn't worth the public relations war.

Why? Because even as one of the OHL's premier attractions last season, he didn't have all that much of an effect on the turnstiles.

Via HockeyDB, we can deduce that 2,662,098 fans took in an OHL game at some point last season. Of those roughly 2.6 million, 117,844 of those were in Sarnia. We can use Yakupov's OHL game log to find out which games he was in, in which rinks, and get individual attendance numbers for those games.

The caveat is that reported attendance numbers usually aren't the amount of fans in the stands. The other thing is that when you're working with a small sampling of games in road rinks (Yakupov played a single game in 10 OHL rinks and didn't pay visit to Barrie, Brampton, Niagara, Oshawa or Peterborough) then you risk landing on a mid-week game instead of a weekend game, which are traditionally less of a draw.

So the numbers with games involving Yakupov would have to be much, much higher in the games he was playing than not to convince me that Yakupov had an effect on OHL attendance, and it wasn't really.

Here are the games with Yakupov in the lineup:

And here are the games without Yakupov:

If these numbers are 100 per cent accurate and have accounted for the discrepancy of weekday vs. weekend games, then we can deduce that Yakupov brought 21 more fans to every Sting home game and 211 fans to any other rink. Those are slight increases of 0.6 per cent and 5.4 per cent, or not enough to convince me that Yakupov is a giant draw.

It's not like these rinks are at absolute capacity with Yakupov in the lineup. Give or take a few dozen seats based on maximum attendance estimates on Wikipedia, these buildings are about 74 per cent full with Yakupov playing and just 72 per cent full without him around.

He's a help, but he isn't the league's biggest draw. I don't stand too convinced that, for OHL's attendance or marketing purposes, he's worth the fight for the OHL to bring him back to North America. Of course, that's not all the Sting are interested in when it comes to Yakupov's contract, but noteworthy when considering what Yakupov's overall effect on the league was.