The Ottawa Senators have announced that they are removing 1500 seats from the Canadian Tire Centre in order to better fill the arena.
The decision to remove seats from the arena to “right size” the building is not particularly surprising. This will allow the team to report higher attendance percentages this season. After all, the Ottawa Senators took a lot of heat for failing to fill the arena in playoff games this past spring. Notably the team didn’t sell out game out of the second round against the New York Rangers.
Attendance Difficulties
This change will not make an actual difference to the very real problem the Sens had this past off-season in selling tickets. As much as we as Sens fans hate talk about this, not being able to sell out the arena is a problem. Even with the arena as one with a higher capacity it’s a problem.
How bad things got this past season were blown out of proportion. The Sens were tied for 24th in the league in terms of percent of capacity. However, in terms of raw attendance they were 21st. Although this isn’t great it doesn’t look as bad as many say.
This move to adjust the number of seats in the arena is a marketing ploy to attempt to sell more tickets. The idea behind it is that with fewer tickets it will drive demand. However, if there’s only 16000 people who want to buy tickets each game it shouldn’t matter if there’s only 17000 seats. The only thing that changes is which seats are considered the nosebleeds.
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Benefits
The main benefit for Eugene Melnyk and the Ottawa Senators in this decision is that they will be less likely to be publicly ridiculed for lower attendance. People who don’t pay attention will see a higher attendance percentage and be satisfied. However, this isn’t fixing a real problem. If the Sens are going to fix their attendance problem they’ll have to improve at marketing the team.