Bulldogs skating for a ‘Hamilton moment’
Ticket sales take off going into their run at the OHL championship
THE HAMILTON BULLDOGS had just beaten the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in Game 1 of the Ontario Hockey League finals on Thursday night when ticket sales started to whir to life.
Perhaps it was proof that the underdogs could compete with the country’s top-ranked team.
Maybe it was the exciting way they won, lurching out to a 3-0 lead before squandering that and having to score in sudden-death overtime.
Maybe it had something to do with people being reminded a Hamilton team would be hosting an OHL finals game for the first time in four decades.
But tickets for Monday and Wednesday started moving.
“With a win like that, people believe,” says Darren Arnold, the team’s senior director of ticketing.
He says sales picked up late in the
evening and remained steady throughout the day.
He anticipated that by the time he checked for the final time on Friday, the numbers for both Games 3 and 4 at FirstOntario Centre would’ve hit at least 4,500. With roughly 72 hours to go until faceoff.
Knowing how sales patterns have gone in the past, he expects at least 7,000 will be in the building both nights.
And if the Bulldogs could steal Game 2 on Saturday night in the Soo and come home with a 2-0 series lead?
“I think you would see a similar response to (Thursday) night, exponentially,” Arnold says.
Only four teams have hit the 5,000 mark in the playoffs this year.
Niagara filled every one of the Meridian Centre’s 5,300 seats, Kitchener drew 6,975 and London attracted 7,954. And Hamilton has passed that mark twice. Hamilton faces unique challenges. With FirstOntario Centre holding nearly double the number you can cram into London’s Budweiser Gardens, it’s basically impossible to create a prototypical supply-and-demand scenario.
If you know you can always get a ticket, there’s no need to rush out and grab one early.
If you haven’t already put down your money on game day and something else comes up or the weather turns sour — or too nice — or the babysitter cancels or whatever, you don’t feel a need to go.
“It’s hard to have urgency-drivers when we have as many seats as we do,” Arnold says.
This is part of the argument behind the move for a new arena in town that’s more appropriately sized for this league and this level of hockey. That, and the fact that FirstOntario Centre is getting old.
Then there’s the geography. In some of the smaller OHL cities, the team is the focal point of the town. Especially those far from Toronto.
Here in the shadow of Canada’s biggest city, there are many options and many teams to watch and root for. It adds a degree of difficulty to selling tickets. Just like it does in Ottawa, which has the secondlargest arena in the league.
Even with these obstacles, the Bulldogs — who finished sixth in league attendance during the regular season at 4,251, thanks in part to two hugely attended school day games — have averaged 4,131 fans per game in this playoff run.
This despite having just four of their nine home dates on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, which are generally gold in the OHL. On weekends, the number is 4,959 compared to 3,468 on weekdays. Which says two things.
The fact that sales have already gone past 4,500 for Monday’s contest with nearly three days remaining suggests more people are paying attention to this team.
If the Bulldogs could manage to win Saturday and come home with a 2-0 series lead and a chance to win a championship on home ice, the numbers would surely spike dramatically. Second, if this series was to be extended to a Game 6 a week from Sunday at FirstOntario Centre, it could become a Hamilton moment.
Especially if they were in front and could clinch the title. We saw that in 2003 when Game 7 of the Calder Cup finals sold out and in 2007 when over 14,000 people watched the AHL Bulldogs win the championship.
“We’re trying to sell memories,” Arnold says.
Those did that. This could, too.