NHL to Seattle

Quick note on the NBA Board of Governors vote to decline relocation of the Sacramento Kings and what this means to hockey. First, everyone should know that the Arena doesn’t get built without an NBA team committed to Seattle. With no Arena, the NHL will not be an option.

Here are some common questions I get on the ruling and figured an FAQ format might be a good way to address everything.

Why did the NBA decline relocation if the Hansen deal and Seattle market is better than Sacramento? It mostly comes down to a sense of loyalty for existing teams + the city of Sacramento is publically funding 300M arena vs. the 144M in public loan being offered in Seattle. The Seattle deal sets a bad precedent for future owners wanting to arenas in their home city. I should also point out, just because there is a higher deal for a team, doesn’t mean you can move a team. I know it doesn’t seem fair considering our History with the NBA, but the league should try to keep teams in their cities.

Can Hansen and Ballmer go get an NHL team instead? Technically yes but the MOU with the city would need to be reworked. More importantly, Hansen and I assume Ballmer have no desire to own an NHL team. At least that is what Hansen has said publically.

Can someone else get an NHL team to start building the Arena? doubtful. The deal with the City and Hansen/Ballmer group calls for an NBA team. Considering Hansen owns the land and he has all the Construction financing lined up the thought of them going forward with no guarantee of an NBA team seems highly unlikely.

What about NBA relocation? Relocation has been tossed around but I do not think it is an option. The NBA won’t come out and say this but they have a parity problem and it is speculated that it is a player pool issue. I can’t get into it here but it is because there is a limit on the number of tall people that tend to be good basketball players. This isn’t to say small people can’t succeed, it is just on average tall people dominate the NBA.

What’s next? That is the million or should I say $500Million question. Milwaukee is the next franchise with a target on their back and we will hear plenty of news about them in the next 8 months. They need a new arena and even if they do not intend to move them I am sure there will be a constant threat to move the team. This is how the game is played to get as much money out of cities as possible.

What happens if the Sacramento deal blows up? There are lawsuits, bonding issues and some EIS that could blow this thing up in Sacramento. It really won’t matter since the new owners will need to deal with it making relocation unlikely.

What about Levin’s plan in Bellevue?  Unfortunately, Levin needs to sit back and let Hansen/Ballmer thing play out before he can pursue his plan which is said to abandon some time ago. Even though Levin was ahead of Hansen, Hansen has all the momentum and Levin would be viewed as obstructing brining the Sonics back. Anything Levin does will probably need to be supported by Hansen to make sure he has public support.  

Here is my 2013 wrap up report on NHL attendance…(The entire post is replicated over at 3rdlinegrind.com. I try to make that other site my posts that are non-Seattle centric…like this one but a get a ton of traffic here by people searching for “NHL attendance”.)

Following a trend that was spotted early in the year, Average Attendance ended up 2% which might not be that impressive for some but remember that a good portion of markets sell out every game which means that attendance can not increase for half the teams. There are only 15 teams with “Attendance Volatility” in 2011-2012 so only those 15 can really impact the overall numbers. Attendance was up 4% across those 15 teams. 6 of those 15 saw 5% increase year over year and 10 of them saw at least a modest increase over 1%. Only 2 of the 15 (Columbus and St. Louis) saw declines of 1% of more.

What is one of my posts without some graphs?

The more important metric is capacity % and sellout % by team. 

• · As a whole, of the 720 Games in the Season this year, 491 of them were virtual sellouts.
• · The LA Kings have joined the ranks of the season long sellout.
• · Nashville & Tampa Bay sold out 20 and 21 of their 24 home games Not bad for the sunbelt/non-playoff teams.
• · New Jersey had good numbers with 18 of 24 games being sold-out.

Here are how the rest of the teams sellout % look…

One thing I enjoy doing is digging into some of the specifics. I isolated Columbus and the Islanders to see how their attendance over the Season as they were both in a battle to get into the playoffs. AS you can see and as expected, attendance increased as the season went on and games mattered more and more for getting into the playoffs.

Phoenix also saw attendance increase over the season. They had the 2nd biggest increase in average attendance for the year at 12%.

 And since I have the data, I isolated volatile teams only (which includes LA) to take a look at capacity by day of the week and month. As expected, Fridays and Saturday games draw the best and later in the season tends to do better. Note that January only includes a few games per team and I imagine fans were really starved for hockey hence the higher capacity % in January.

Would love to hear your thoughts and if you have any special requests on ways to slice the data let me know.

As those of us that are following the Sacramento Kings situation as if an NHL team coming to Seattle depended on it. News broke earlier today that Whale #1 and Pittsburg Penguins owner Ron Burkle is out of the Kings ownership group. This is shocking news with just 10 more days before the NBA Board of Governors Meeting where they will vote on the Hansen/Ballmer deal for the Sacramento Kings. Kevin Johnson had a press conference earlier to go into damage control mode. To summarize the press conference I am including a timeline of Chris Daniels tweets while he was covering the press conference.

Interesting enough, KJ himself tweeted on March 23rd, 3 days before the City Council vote on the deal that he has just closed the deal with Ron B. I was a little nervous after the New York meetings last week but now I am feeling a little bit better about Seattle’s chances. I don’t like the thought of taking a team away from somewhere but KJ should have known this was possible last year and that he should have lined up a buyer last summer. It would have been easier for his city and the people of Seattle. It was foolish to wait until Hansen had a deal in place to figure out how he would match it. A lot of people in both cities have a ton of respect for KJ but I’ve lost some. He is being careless with city money and not being transparent about the $$$ involved here. There were several Finance workshops on the Seattle deal that reviewed deep detail of Hansen’s assumptions and questioned a lot of his figures that he himself answered.