Viewpoint: Hockey is fading away from Ottawa’s centre of attention

By Daniel Vazzoler

Well, I never thought I’d say this, but Ottawa isn’t a hockey town anymore — but there’s a chance that can change if fans start showing up for hockey games in the city.

The Ottawa Senators are 25th out of the 30 teams in the National Hockey League (NHL) in attendance this season, averaging 16,137 people per game — filling just 84 per cent of the 19,153 seats in the Canadian Tire Centre. Attendance has dropped 10 per cent from last year, when the team averaged 94 per cent — and hasn’t been this low since the 2001-02 season, when the average was 16,919 people per game.

The poor turnout puts Ottawa significantly behind the other six Canadian teams in the NHL (the Vancouver Canucks are the next lowest Canadian team at 97 per cent and the Toronto Maple Leafs lead at 114 per cent, thanks to additional standing-room attendance) and has the team losing a potential $460,530 in ticket revenue per game, according to a recent Ottawa Citizen article.

Most sports fans in Ottawa know just how much Sens owner Eugene Melnyk values the bottom line, and it may only be a matter of time before he starts looking at other options. Remember, Quebec City desperately wants an NHL team, and the league looks like it could go back to Quebec City after putting that city’s expansion proposal on hold last year.

Part of the reason the league hasn’t expanded to Quebec City already is that there were too many teams out east — so relocating the Sens would eliminate that issue.

It will likely take more than one poor season in attendance for Melnyk to pull the team out of town — especially given his involvement in a planned LeBreton Flats redevelopment and sports stadium. However, he has expressed his disappointment with the decline in attendance for Sens games. He has pointed to issues with the federal government’s Phoenix pay system and potential ticket-buyers not getting paid and therefore not going to games. He has also said he hopes fans will show up in higher numbers as the playoffs near and the Sens continue to be in the hunt for a post-season spot.

The onus isn’t solely on the fans to help fix attendance. While ticket prices are a significant barrier for some, the biggest thing to fix is the fan experience at Sens games. Fans have been vocal that they don’t like dealing with the hassle of getting to the rink in Kanata and then having to deal with outdated facilities of the Canadian Tire Centre, such as the small, crowded concourse and older seating areas.

The team has tried to fix some of the issues with the arena by upgrading some of those older aspects of the building. Their most recent attempts to liven up the arena started with replacing the old jumbo-tron with a new, high-definition scoreboard back in 2011. In 2013, they also added 700 high definition screens throughout the concourse and implemented Cisco’s StadiumVision technology to help allow the fans to watch the game while they are waiting in line to get their food.

At the start of the 2015-16 season, the Sens unveiled Club Bell, a new area of members-only seating in the lower-bowl of the Canadian Tire Centre. They then added some more premium seats at the beginning of this season with the Molson Canadian Fan Deck as a way to enhance the fan experience in the arena.

A big part of getting people out to the rink is finding a way to convince them that spending their money and time to go to the game is more valuable than staying at home to watch the game.

With the team expected to move to that new, downtown home at LeBreton Flats in a few years — the goal being the 2020-21 season — fans should expect newer features in the arena that will make the game-day experience more enjoyable. Part of the inspiration for what LeBreton Flats will become is based on what the Edmonton Oilers have done, so people should expect an arena with great swaths of concourse space, lots of premium seating that won’t take away from existing seats and convenient transport to and from the arena on a newly built light-rail transit system.

All that assumes the team will still be here when the LeBreton Flats vision becomes a reality.

So, Ottawa may not be looking like the “hockey country” it used to be, but filling the seats like fans did in the late 2000s would help rebuild that reputation.