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NHL lockout benefits local hockey team
Ticket sales, attendance up, president says
By MATTHEW FRENCH
Staff Writer
When the National Hockey League announced at the beginning of its would-be season that players were to be locked out, teams in the East Coast Hockey League may have secretly—and quietly—cheered.
They hoped to see a windfall as hockey fans turned their attention to their brand of hockey as an alternative to the NHL. However, that boon has not necessarily been the case around the minor leagues. Many markets have suffered from slumps in ticket sales, as hockey has faded to the background of American sports, according to published reports.
That does not hold true for the South Carolina Stingrays, the Lowcountry’s AA hockey team, which is selling more tickets this year than in years past, says team president Taylor Lee.
While Lee is happy that his team is doing well financially and in the standings, he laments that it comes at the expense of the game.
“The lockout was good for the ECHL, but a black eye for the industry,” says Lee. “That’s something any sports fan can appreciate and realize. With no NHL this year, some money and players were pushed down to the American Hockey League and the East Coast Hockey League.”
The East Coast Hockey League has a symbiotic relationship with the NHL. The Stingrays, for example, are affiliated with the Washington Capitals of the NHL, but don’t receive any revenue from the big club. So even though the Capitals aren’t skating, it doesn’t hurt the Stingrays one bit, Lee says.
“As a result (of the NHL shutting down), we’re getting some NHL-caliber guys playing for us,” says Lee. “Jeremy Stevenson, for example, started the season on the roster of the Nashville Predators.”
As a result of NHL players filtering down to the AHL and ECHL, Lee says the quality of play is at a level fans of the league aren’t used to seeing. The ECHL also has in place a salary cap, meaning teams are only allowed to spend so much on players, which prevents any one from dominating for a number of years. That point is, ironically, one of the major sticking points between NHL players and owners.
“The play on the ice, from a non-coaching perspective, has definitely seen its level increase,” he says. “The game is played faster and it’s more precise. Because of that, word-of-mouth gets out that these teams really look good, and that drives more traffic, too.”
Since ECHL teams don’t rely on revenue from their NHL affiliates, they are left to their own devices to make money. Lee says a new marketing campaign has certainly helped the Stingrays increase the number of bodies they put in the seats on an average night, but can’t discount the fact that no hockey on television means local fans will probably make their way to the North Charleston Coliseum to see the sport they love.
Brian McKenna, commissioner of the ECHL, says the league as a whole has seen “no material impact” from the NHL lockout, with the exception of markets in Gwinnett, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, and Long Beach, Calif., which share a close proximity to NHL markets.
“In those markets, we’ve seen a small uptick in attendance, largely in weekend games,” McKenna says. “But the balance of the markets that have seen an increase in attendance do so because of increased season ticket sales and their individual marketing efforts.”
Some teams in the league have taken polls and surveys of fans attending the game to try and draw a correlation between increased attendance and the lack of the major professional hockey league, but the results haven’t shown that connection, McKenna says.
“In the longer term, if the NHL stays locked out next year, I think it will have a negative effect on our league and that effect will get worse the longer they don’t play,” he says.
“When hockey isn’t front and center of the media and TV coverage, it largely goes unnoticed, particularly in markets like Charleston, S.C., where there isn’t an NHL franchise nearby,” McKenna says.
The ECHL has received greater exposure in some areas, as the NHL Network carries an ECHL game of the week in Canada and the ECHL All Star game in January was carried by more stations and seen in more households than ever before, he says.
According to a statement released in late February by the ECHL, the league as a whole is averaging nearly 5,000 attendees per game. That number represents about half of the capacity of the North Charleston Coliseum where the Stingrays play.
“The ECHL raised its average attendance (and saw) an increase of 5 percent from the first 18 weeks of last season,” the statement reads. “The ECHL, which had a slight increase in leaguewide average season ticket sales from 2003-04, has drawn 2.7 million through its first 695 games. The ECHL has surpassed the two million mark each of the past 14 years and will surpass the three million mark for the 12th season in a row.”
And there is no doubt the Stingrays’ numbers are up, according to Lee.
“Industrywide, sports in general has been a flat market, so we’re thankful for the spike this year, but it’s a shame it had to come about the way it did,” says Lee. “We’ve seen a spike in our season ticket sales and a great increase in groups that come out. In fact, we’ve surpassed at this point in the year (with 10 games left in the season, as of press time) our total group sales from last year.”
Matthew French is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at mfrench@crbj.com.
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