Thank you all who responded to last month’s survey. The # of responses exceed my expectations and some of the comments you all shared made me laugh and smile. If you would still like to respond, you can fill it out here & I will refresh the data every couple weeks. Here are the highlights:
Location
I asked your zip code to calculate where the audience comes from. No surprise, Seattle dominated the responses with 27.5% coming from the city limits.
One slightly interesting note is that Tacoma had the 2nd highest response rate of all cities in the area. Note that not all responses were from people in the Seattle area. To get an idea of the high level of responses, I bucketed the responses in the following categories.
Favorite team
I’ve long said that Seattle hockey market is fragmented and so it is tough to know how big the community is here since there isn’t one team that people can talk about, watch at a bar or sport their merchandise. The results of the survey proved that out pretty well. All 30 NHL teams were represented and 2 former NHL teams were identified as “favorite teams”. I loved the write in votes for Seattle.
Vancouver on top shouldn’t be that big of a surprise. When Vancouver was in the finals, Seattle was a top 10 TV market for a few of the games (TV numbers didn’t even include the CBC fragmenting market).
Attendance Intent
Per the first bar graph at the top of the post, King County response volume doubled the sum of Pierce and Snohomish counties so although a comparable volume, it should be no surprise that King County will be the bulk of the ticket holder base. This should not be a surprise since King County has the highest population. Some interesting things about the data is the numbers outside the 3 main counties. Several people from Canada and a lot from Oregon mentioned that they would make several trips a year to check out games. On a related note, several people wrote in that they would cancel their season tickets in Vancouver if Seattle were to get a team.
Odds and ends
I could not include all the write in responses but here are some of the highlights. (I loved reading them all, even the one that said “screw Seattle, but the team in Louisiana.):
Best of luck from Massachusetts. Would love to see a team in Seattle. League is missing a major opportunity, great city, great fans.
Get it done! I’m dying to root for my home team and to go to games!!
Go Seatlle, you’ll have a ton of people coming down from greater vancouver, just like we do for the seahawks
I love hockey but it is hard to get behind a team because I don’t have one that is local, I feel I would be much more engaged in the league and the sport if Seattle had a team.
I really hope the NHL brings a team to the Emerald City. A positive, supportive atmosphere would be sure to greet the team.
It’s time to bring the NHL to Seattle, guys like Akerley blocked it years ago, lets make it happen!
Let’s make this happen. Not only for the highest level of professional sports, but for the growth of the game and benefits at the younger levels of the game. For our kids!