Now that the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team has been sold and is moving north to Winnipeg people are going to say that Atlanta is not a good sports town.
They are already saying that fans are fickle there and they can never be motivated in enough numbers to take interest in watching NHL hockey. They will say that Atlanta is a college sports (Georgia and Georgia Tech) town before any other pro sport. They will only support and build interest in a sport like baseball if their team is winning every year.
The thing is that many of those things can be said about any major US city.
In fact if you look closely at Atlanta’s loss of NHL hockey after 11 pretty uneventful years you will find that there is no particular glaring difference between the Thrasher’s fledgling support of a mediocre product than what fans in places like Chicago, Boston, Anaheim and Denver sometimes refuse to support. Except for that those places have all been boosted by winning.
The key word is ‘fledgling’ because when something is established long enough in the community there becomes an acceptance of it even if the visible support for it can ebb and flow from year to year and we acknowledge that will happen. A team in last place for years, with management making bad trades and with no inkling to generate excitement will result in less fan support across the board no matter which city it is with few exceptions.
PROBLEM WITH BAD OWNERSHIP
The problem with bad ownership and a lack of direction from the get go is that the invisible things that have to happen to make a sports team successful never get off the ground.
Those invisibles are things that create a thirst for the product. The community buying in as it falls in love with its team. It doesn’t usually happen overnight. It takes commitment from management and patience of those footing the bills and most important some buy-in from the corporate community.
You won’t get buy-in from a corporate base when fans and sponsors don’t trust in ownership. If they think they aren’t trying in a big city of over 5.5 million people there are better ways to invest money than long term commitments with failure.
This is where I find Atlanta hockey now after the Thrashers have moved.
They are not the first franchise run into the ground by people who had no interest in really owning a product that would take time and money to develop.
I am not the only one who thinks the notion preposterous that the city of Atlanta can’t support NHL hockey when much smaller cities with less going for them like Raleigh, Nashville, San Jose, and Tampa can.
The difference is most of those places (I will leave out Tampa because I think they are in the same battle as Atlanta just with better owners) have started grassroots love affair commitments with their teams. So if their teams ever decide to leave it will meet some protest first.
The disaster group, which so wrongly named itself Atlanta Spirit LLC that has owned the Thrashers since 2004 reports to have lost $130 million over the last six years, but would it surprise you to know that the first owners of the Thrashers made money in their first two seasons even when they were still coated with expansion glitter?
The franchise came into the hands of Sprit LLC in good shape but as well all know left on a respirator.
Time Warner headed up by Ted Turner brought hockey back to Atlanta successfully in 1999 and in those first two seasons he made money before selling to the Spirit LLC assets that included the Philips Arena and Hawks NBA team.
It was still pre-NHL lockout so arguably the excitement of Atlanta hockey was gutted by the NHL labour woes more so than by new owners, but the inside rumour is that the Spirit (that breaks the city spirits) were never really interested in owning the hockey team but they did want them as tenants. They may have been trying to sell off the hockey team from the start!
It wouldn’t be the first time that a sports venture just suffered bad timing.
Things were going along great for the Thrashers to kick off hockey being back in Atlanta all except for winning.
In 2000 the Thrashers had the eleventh best attendance (17206 fans per game) in the 30 team NHL.
COMPARING ATLANTA
By comparison, Denver’s Colorado Avalanche as Stanley Cup contenders had only 600 more fans than the Thrashers. Boston, a similar sports market in size and mix of teams but more established for decades of hockey history, in a northern city had 1000 fewer fans per game, the same as even colder Chicago. Weather had little to do with it.
Regardless of which sport it is Atlanta has to be compared to these other cities in all things.
The new Atlanta team should never have been outdrawing these established places if they aren’t supposed to care there. But at various times over the decade Atlanta was supported better in the stands than both Chicago and Boston.
Atlanta has things going for it that other places do not.
Of the 5 to 6 million habitants in the racially diverse metro Atlanta catchment there are 2.5 million people that moved there from other states, mostly northern states that would know about hockey. That group is akin to three Winnipeg’s with higher mean incomes and they are young and upward moving with an average age of 34 (according to the 2008 census) a little younger than the US national average urban age.
But they have choices, and if they are not inspired, they are as likely as fans anywhere to not catch on.
Hockey will work in the south.
It works in other big city markets with distractions like Dallas. But it can’t work with boobs as owners.
There are enough economic challenges with a recession economy and corporate cutbacks, but the road Atlanta travelled with hockey where in the end those who had money locally were a little shy to risk stepping in to save the team was not much different from the one travelled in Vancouver (Canada) with the National Basketball Association ten years ago.
A MORE GRIZZLY OUTCOME
The expansion Vancouver Grizzlies NBA franchise eventually moved because ownership did not want to keep owning them.
They were spooked by the rapidly deteriorating economics of owning professional sports teams and they couldn’t find lucrative local offers to keep the NBA in western Canada.
But it did not start out that way. When the NBA looked at expanding into Canada more than one group was interested in winning the bid.
When Vancouver got their franchise for 1995 they sold 12500 season tickets with fifty percent down on each one. This was better than expansion cousins in Orlando and Minnesota that struggled to reach the minimum 10000 season tickets requirement to be awarded teams.
The new Grizzlies averaged over 16000 fans right away, but three years in the NBA lockout ground things to a halt and the Grizzlies lost momentum.
They also were in last in their division for 5 of the 6 seasons they played. Everyone knew the owners, Orca Bay Sports and Entertainment who also owned the Vancouver NHL team, wanted out of the sports business because the Canadian dollar made it near impossible to run a franchise that sucked out American dollar expenses worth almost forty percent more than what the locals paid.
The average attendance following the NBA lockout in Vancouver for the 1998-99 season was lower at 13899, it was the excuse for pulling out and by 2001 the team was sold and moved to Memphis.
Would people in Vancouver like to be told that they aren’t a basketball town?
Canada is the cradle of basketball isn’t it?
Perhaps the circumstances of the time were just not great for starting an expansion basketball team, and to their credit just look at the NBA today and the Vancouver support at its worst might be considered acceptable these days.
The lack of a committed owner hurt the Grizzlies as well as the lack of enthusiasm that would have been contagious if they had a winner. If things were different it might have given somebody with deep pockets that likes sports reason to take a chance with that product, but again that team never had a chance.
By comparison up until the very end the Thrashers have done miles better in Atlanta than the Grizzlies did in Canada’s basketball hotbed.
NHL LOCKOUT HURT ATLANTA
The NHL lockout hurt hockey in Atlanta, because by the time it ended the Thrashers had to start rebuilding things from scratch. They were only six years old and had to miss a whole year, and even their turn at hosting the NHL All-Star game was delayed by the lockout.
In 2006-07 the Thrashers became division champs and pulled in 16240 fans a game, which was only a hundred less than the Anaheim Ducks who won the cup.
The Thrashers also drew 2000 fans better than Boston, 3000 better than Washington, and 4000 better than Chicago. This only shows that a winning team, Atlanta, drew more fans than what at the time were terrible teams that missed the playoffs.
The difference you would not see behind those attendance figures.
Washington, Chicago, and Boston were building young teams and had patient owners.
Atlanta was about to tear apart the team because the new economic reality of keeping a winner meant the Thrashers needed more corporate sponsorship, but the team wasn’t catching fire in the business community. Probably because they did not trust the ownership group of eight whom by that time already had started fighting over a legal issue where one partner wanted to buy out the other seven. It took three seasons for that to go to court and the money moves needed to keep the Atlanta hockey team competitive and build on that successful season when they made the playoffs was not really available.