Empty seats embarrass Saskatoon

SASKATOON —Yeah, the top-end talent has been great at this week’s Memorial Cup — Seth Jones, Nathan MacKinnon, Jonathan Drouin, et al — but the empty blue seats at Saskatoon’s Credit Union Centre are the real stars.

Everybody’s talking about those seats — vast tracts of blue, unsold and empty, plainly visible on every telecast.

Twitter’s all over those empty seats; it’s a hot topic of conversation in the arena’s bowels, where scouts and media mix and mingle.

Things reached a crescendo Thursday night, when the host Blades — playing a tiebreaking game with a spot to the semifinal on the line — drew just 7,895, the second-smallest crowd of the entire tournament. It was inexplicable and puzzling and, frankly, embarrassing.

Several hours before that game, former Blade Rhett Warrener blasted the team and the committee during his radio show on Sportsnet 960 The Fan.

“Most importantly,” he said after pinning some blame for the empty seats on the Blades’ first-round playoff ouster and the recent nice weather, “they’ve done a terrible job of promoting it and including the fan base in it. The ownership and the management ... I don’t know how many people have called me and said they don’t have a clue what they’re doing. They’ve got no organization behind it; they’re just throwing balls up in the air and letting it drop. It’s just been, from a lot of people I’ve heard, poorly, poorly, poorly run.”

Warrener added that Blades management has “jaded the fan base, to the point where the people ... it’s not just ‘I don’t feel like going.’ They’re making a point of not going.” Ouch! Sportsnet columnist Stephen Brunt, a guest, voiced the opinion of many a few moments later — saying it was “shocking to watch.

“A lot of us,” he added, “are saying, geez — Saskatchewan, junior hockey, Memorial Cup ... surely this is going to work. It has been very weird looking on and seeing all those empty seats, not just for games not involving the Blades, but for games when the home team’s playing.”

I’ve heard very little about bad organization, it’s not bothering the people I’ve talked to, so we’ll leave that alone. But the above comments reflect just how varied the opinion and reaction is to what’s happened this week in Saskatoon.

The attendance issue is deep and complicated, so here’s some cold, hard numbers.

Credit Union Centre holds 15,195. The tournament so far has drawn 71,015 fans, an average of 8,877 per game. That 71,015 is the seventh-highest total all time with one game still to play, and should move up to fourth.

This tournament was never going to sell out. Doing so would have blown away the record 121,561, set in Vancouver in 2007, a number that dwarfs the runner-up 84,686 (Quebec City; 2003).

The Memorial Cup is, historically, an 8,000 to 10,000-fan event. Saskatoon fits into those parameters this year, even with terrible-looking optics coming from an arena that’s cavernous by most junior hockey standards.

There’s no question the numbers could have been higher, and looked better on TV, had organizers made ticket prices more accessible. Those wanting to attend Wednesday’s Blades/Winterhawks game, for example, were looking at prices ranging from $66.25 (including service charges) to $113.75, unless they wanted the $37.50 tickets at the very back rows of the upper bowl.

You’ve got to like junior hockey an awful lot to spend $265 for your family of four at the $66.25 price point.

We’ve heard this week from many people who were excited about attending a game until they saw the prices.

Those people, and there’s many, opted to watch from home. This doesn’t make them bad sports fans; it makes them cautious household budgeters.

For the final two games, prices in the upper deck have fallen to $27 (including service charges) as the committee coaxes fans into the building for what should be a doozy of a final.

In the final tally, it would have been the height of blind optimism to expect every seat to be full during this Memorial Cup. But, given Saskatoon’s past history of supporting bigticket events, 10,000 or 11,000 fans per night should have been realistic and attainable — and it’s a disgrace that the Blades drew just 7,895 for their last game.

As respectable as the final attendance numbers will look in black and white, none of this looks good on Saskatoon — not with those vacant seats visible, in high-definition colour, for all to see night after night after night.