Tickets available for Heritage Classic
Many have been given away for NHL’s fourth ‘outdoor’ game this Sunday at B.C. Place
With the Heritage Classic just a few days away, it appears the NHL and the Vancouver Canucks are having difficulty selling the remaining tickets for the ‘outdoor’ game at B.C. Place Stadium on Sunday.
Amid reports of give aways and deep discounting for tickets, the NHL’s executive vice-president events Don Renzulli said in a media briefing on Wednesday that about 90 per cent of the tickets for the game had been sold and he was confident the venue would be full for the game.
Renzulli couldn’t supply an exact number for the arena’s capacity for the one-off event, saying it was somewhere between 52,000 and 53,000.
The Canucks will play the Ottawa Senators in the sixth and final NHL outdoor game of the season on Sunday afternoon.
Asked if tickets were being given away, Renzulli said:
“Yes, we’ve had a legacy program that we’ve done in every market. We’ve had an overwhelming response from all the youth organizations.
“When we talked to the Canucks, they said they wanted to make that a little bit larger, so we’ve expanded that to some degree. We feel that’s part of what this is. It’s getting young children here to see this in a big atmosphere.”
Renzulli also defended the price of the tickets, running from $104.40 to $324.70 — which many people have complained is too high considering the venue seats nearly triple that of a regular game at Rogers Arena.
“Pricing the tickets, we look at the market,” said Renzulli. “It’s not much different than a lot of the buildings we’ve been in. The secondary (resale) market is always large. We’ve done four of these this year and the secondary market has been as big as 10,000 or 11,000 tickets. That’s not unusual. We looked at the pricing, we talked with the Canucks, we worked with them hand in hand on the pricing. None of these games are inexpensive to put on. We try to price them similar to what they would have next door (Rogers Arena).”
But Kingsley Bailey, owner of ticket broker Vancouver Ticket, said he’s seeing people trying to sell their Heritage Classic tickets, as opposed to buying, at a rate of nine to one.
“It’s like trying to pull teeth,” said Bailey.
“It’s a tough sell because Ottawa is the worst team we could have gone up against. People want to see Toronto or Montreal, Original Six teams — even Winnipeg would have been better.”
Meanwhile, the building of the temporary rink was going according to plan on Wednesday, said chief icemaker Mike Craig, senior manager of facility operations for the NHL.
“We charged our refrigeration system late Tuesday night and were able to put the first layer of water on about 5 a.m. on Wednesday morning,” he said.