Scrambling for excuses on Ottawa Senators’ failure to sell out

If you’ve lived in this city, you know all of these arguments. You know it’s not just one single factor for why it’s a challenge for the Senators to sell out their home arena. If you talk to 10 different Senators fans, they will give you 10 different reasons why they don’t attend games on a consistent basis. If this was merely a price point issue, that would be an easy fix. That’s what keeps some fans away, but not all of them.

The situation in Ottawa is a strange marriage of complacency and anger that’s hard to describe unless you live in this market. It’s a deep-rooted and complex situation that does not have a simple solution. The downtown arena will help with one part of the issue, but it won’t solve everything that ails this franchise. It certainly won’t erase the obstacle preventing the federal government from buying season tickets, so there will still be challenges ahead.

Those high up seats were being sold for $100, which is an incredible hike, but still doesn’t seem like too much to ask. Rangers fans are probably piling in cars right now to cash in on a deal for Game 2. Is it the parking thing? Now that I could see. When you raise your ticket prices for playoff games, it’s because the product you’re selling has improved and the stakes are higher. But demanding $10 more for folks to park their car is ridiculous, not to mention sheer greed. It’s still the same old lots. No wash has been included.

Maybe people spent the nicest day of the year at the beach and then didn’t want to leave? Another excuse being floated at the Postmedia end of the press box for the porous turnout: Too many games scheduled in April.

Thanks to one playoff series win in the past ten years and the lack of confidence in Melnyk to deliver a winner, it’s hard to blame fans for what’s essentially a reasonable reaction to this product. Ottawa has a smart fan base and fatigue has set in and they’re voicing their displeasure with their wallets.

That doesn’t mean that this city and its fans don’t support this hockey club. They do. It just means that there’s a serious distrust with the way that their hockey team is operating. Until there’s a significant improvement or the vision for this team’s future outlook becomes less muddied, it’s an issue that the organization will have to address.

The truth of the matter is that Ottawa simply doesn’t have a big enough season ticket base. Though the club never publicly discloses how many season tickets they have sold, it stands to reason that the number is well under 10,000. That means on a nightly basis, the Senators have to drum up enough walk-up sales to fill at least half their building – which is located well outside of the downtown core.

The magic number for Ottawa should be to get to 12,000 season tickets, but it’s certainly a challenge for a market that does not have the corporate support that other Canadian cities enjoy.

This league’s media is so damn territorial it doesn’t even realize when it’s showing itself right in front of its face. If attendance is a non-issue because of reasons A, B, and C in this case, then that standard needs to apply everywhere. And when it doesn’t – because, let’s be honest, it won’t – feel free to bump this column right back up to the top of the page.

No, the Senators aren’t relocating to Iqaluit. And neither are the Hurricanes. Enough already.