NHL 2023-2024 Out of Town: Regular Season III
- Thread starter smithformeragent
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Ludwig Fell Down
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Ludwig Fell Down
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This is normally my favorite time of year, the post-January Leafs hot streak that gets the fan base ready for the parade. However, this team is impressive. I still don't think they are built for a long playoff run. Having said that, if they started a 7-game series with the B's tomorrow, I'd take the Leafs in 6.Leaf cup talk picking up ...
Bruinaura
Resident Cookie Monster
- Mar 29, 2014
- 47,230
- 92,994
Bruinaura
Resident Cookie Monster
- Mar 29, 2014
- 47,230
- 92,994
Cocaine was never a good idea but these days it’s especially a bad idea due to it occasionally being cut with fentanyl. To then take this bad idea and then have the even worse idea to film it is braindead. To then take the video and put it online as a professional athlete making 6 figures…wow just wow. And to take it another step- you do all of this as a dispensable 4th liner. Early contender for dumbest athlete of 2024. He is going to be hard to unseat.
He needs help. I hope the NHL helps him because no "normal" person is filming themselves doing drugs and putting it online to see. Addiction is terrible.
There'll be a small but solid percentage of hockey players, and pro-athletes of every other sport, who do cocaine and similar in the offseason. It's very prevalent. Much as I also think it's stupid, that's reality. What sets Ruzicka apart is what you mentioned - the filming, plus doing it during the season. Just incredibly dumb.
08SeaBass08
Maybe next year.
EverettMike
FIRE DON SWEENEY INTO THE SUN
Adam Ruzicka filmed himself doing blow and put it on the internet
EverettMike
FIRE DON SWEENEY INTO THE SUN
Winnipeg Jets ownership sounds the alarm on attendance: ‘Not going to work over the long haul’
Chris JohnstonFeb 23, 2024
963
WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Behind a large desk in an office tower with a view out over True North Square, Mark Chipman is working the phones.
Chipman is chairman of the Winnipeg Jets. A local businessman who got caught up in the failed movement to save his city’s NHL team three decades ago, he later fixed his gaze on bringing big-league hockey back to one of the smallest markets in North American professional sports and defied the odds by actually making it happen.
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On this day, he’s still fighting to ensure the Jets work in Winnipeg by taking on a cumbersome task: making personal calls to those who have let their season tickets lapse.
The organization’s once-solid foundation seems to again be quaking beneath Chipman’s feet. Even playing out of the NHL’s smallest permanent arena, which holds 15,225 fans for hockey games, the Jets are drawing just 87.4 percent of capacity this season, the third-lowest mark in the 32-team league. Their overall average attendance of 13,306 is the lowest of any NHL team other than the Arizona Coyotes, who are playing in a college arena. And that’s despite the Jets being one of the top-performing teams in the Western Conference.
Winnipeg’s season-ticket base has suffered a 27 percent decline in just three years, falling from approximately 13,000 to just under 9,500, according to the Jets.
“I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t say, ‘We’ve got to get back to 13,000,’” Chipman said. “This place we find ourselves in right now, it’s not going to work over the long haul. It just isn’t.”
One by one, Chipman gathers first-hand information from the people who are no longer walking through the doors of Canada Life Centre after filling the building for 332 straight sellouts upon the Jets’ return in October 2011.
Why did they stop coming?
What would convince them to return?
It’s difficult to imagine another member of the NHL’s Board of Governors rolling up their sleeves to this degree, but failure to turn the situation around could threaten the 2.0 version of the Jets’ ability to remain healthy and competitive in the long-term, Chipman said.
The Jets’ health, on and off the ice, is an extremely sensitive subject in a city where heartbreak has been felt before. The Jets left town once already — for Arizona, perhaps the ultimate symbol of hockey’s southern expansion — only to be reborn with a second chance. Losing the team again would likely mean the end for top-tier pro sports in Winnipeg.
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So Chipman is looking for opportunities to win back business by offering invitations to former ticket buyers to return for a game of their choice before the end of this regular season.
“They’ve been really very friendly,” Chipman said of his calls during an exclusive interview with The Athletic this week. “When I first started making them, I wasn’t sure what I would encounter, but they weren’t hard calls. They were, ‘Look, I want to come back, but I’ve got two kids, 9 and 11. They’re playing hockey. I can’t come to that many games.’ And I get it. We understand.
“Had another guy annoyed over the fact that we had a discounted ticket and beer offering last year. Fair enough. You’re a full-season ticket holder. Somebody in your section got in on a promotion we did. Our bad.
“It’s a whole range of stuff, but pretty much everyone I spoke to today is coming back to a game.”
Mark Chipman greets fans at a game in 2013. (Marianne Helm / Getty Images)
Amid the swirl of excitement that accompanied Winnipeg’s return to the league after a 15-year hiatus was a warning from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.
“It isn’t going to work very well unless this building is sold out every night,” he said.
That statement didn’t initially pop the way it does when read in the current context, because in the spring of 2011, there was a fervor around the reborn Jets. When it was announced that the Atlanta Thrashers were migrating north to Manitoba, 13,500 season tickets were sold in 17 minutes on a Saturday.
Much had changed since the original Jets left town, starting with the construction of a well-appointed downtown arena and the introduction of a league-wide salary cap that tied player salaries to overall revenue.
What remained the same was the fact that Winnipeg would need to punch above its weight to compete with teams based out of much larger markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto. With a population of 749,607, according to the 2021 Canadian Census, there’s a friendly feel in the air here: the kind of place where Chipman routinely hears opinions on the team’s roster while pumping gas and where, yes, you may end up receiving a phone call from the NHL franchise’s chairman about renewing your season tickets.
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Chipman said he feels “indebted” to the NHL for the city’s second chance.
He first made a presentation to top league officials in January 2007 during a meeting that included representatives from Las Vegas, Seattle, Houston and Kansas City, and ultimately saw Winnipeg pushed to the front of the queue when the Thrashers came up for sale and relocation four years later.
While NHL officials continue to believe in the viability of the market — “We wish all of our clubs were selling all of their tickets for every game, but I can’t say there’s a level of concern,” deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Athletic during the NHL’s Board of Governors meeting in December — Chipman acknowledged that the Jets are on the radar at league’s head office for reasons they’d rather not be.
“They pay attention,” he said. “They see the numbers. They see where the league’s at and where we’re at. And we’re an outlier right now. So, rightfully, they want to know, what are you doing? What’s going on? What happened and what are you doing about it?”
Bettman is scheduled to visit Winnipeg on Tuesday and get a firsthand look at the situation, meeting with key corporate sponsors and potentially even addressing fans directly before that night’s game against the St. Louis Blues.
That comes as the organization’s sales team has started shifting its attention to the 2024-25 season. For the first time this season, the Jets will give priority on playoff ticket purchases to those who put down a deposit on season seats for next season. And they’ve grown more flexible with options covering a select number of games.
Currently, the team has a season-ticket base of roughly 9,500 — an unsustainably low number, according to Chipman. The team saw a big decline in renewals when the pandemic hit and has endured subsequent drops after the past two seasons.
They are now feverishly trying to reverse the tide.
When Jets fans fill Canada Life Centre, as in this playoff game against the Golden Knights, it’s a formidable place to play. (Jason Halstead / Getty Images)
To understand how the Jets got here, you must first understand what made their lengthy sellout streak unique to begin with.
They managed to fill the building for more than a decade despite having just 15 percent of their season seats purchased by businesses. That lags well below the norm in a league in which some teams sell 50 percent of their tickets to corporate interests, according to Chipman.
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What that means in practical terms is, in Winnipeg you need real people to spend real money on 41 home dates per year. And the way they did that initially was through a significant number of individuals going in on shared season-ticket packages with friends and family — a market reality that Chipman viewed as a strength until seeing what happened when a member or two of each group moved out of town or ran into a situation in which they could no longer afford to keep up their end of the arrangement.
“It was like a bubble that burst on us,” Chipman said. “We had what I thought was this strength in numbers that didn’t turn out to be.”
In response, they’ve tried to rally local business leaders.
The Jets have recently recruited 34 well-connected men and women and asked them to tap into their networks to try and generate new business. Chipman said he’s been extremely forthcoming with that group about the challenges of operating an NHL team. The idea is to not only tug at civic pride but also reinforce the positive economic and psychological benefits that the presence of the Jets brings to the community.
“What we try to convey to those people is, we’re trying to win,” Chipman said. “And in order to win or be competitive, we’ve got to keep up. We will never match the Leafs’ gate. It’s really remarkable. We can’t match that. But Edmonton really outperforms us, and that’s harder to accept, right? Because we think of ourselves as equals.
“I know Edmonton is a bigger city and they have that pedigree of all those Stanley Cups, but I think most people in Winnipeg and most people in Edmonton look at one another (with) a healthy respect.”
There’s a natural inclination for him to look around the league and draw these comparisons. Unlike the NFL or NBA, which have massive national television rights deals, the NHL remains a gate-driven league. And elsewhere, business is booming.
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Chipman specifically mentions the success of markets that were once referred to as “non-traditional,” like Nashville, Dallas, Carolina, Florida and Las Vegas.
“The game’s growing,” he said. “You’ve seen it. You’ve had a front-row seat. Those markets in the U.S. that we used to look down upon, they’re fun, and they’re alive.”
To some degree, the lingering effects of the pandemic and an inflationary environment account for what’s happened in his own backyard, but that doesn’t tell the entire story. The Jets have the second-cheapest tickets in Canada, according to Chipman, and they plan to institute only a negligible bump in cost for some sections, with a decrease in others, next season.
Chipman doesn’t shy away from the organization’s role in the current state of affairs.
They’ve heard complaints from customers ranging from the high costs associated with transferring tickets between members of a group to frustrations about the Jets’ previous unwillingness to sell smaller packages. They’ve also had to build up a sales staff that wasn’t needed in the days when the tickets basically sold themselves.
“We’ve had to reinvent ourselves,” Chipman said. “For 10 years, we weren’t a sales organization; we were a service organization, and I’m not sure we were that good of a service organization, to be honest with you.”
As the Jets’ business took a turn in recent years, one of the toughest parts about addressing the problem has been talking about it at all.
There’s a sensitivity to the fact that people in the community are struggling. There are more important things than professional hockey. And as the team found out when it evoked images of the 1996 Jets departure as part of a ticket-selling campaign dubbed “Forever Winnipeg” last spring, even the vague notion of a looming threat to its viability wasn’t received well.
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“Because of the history, it’s a bit of a tinderbox,” Chipman said. “In retrospect, we weren’t trying to be dramatic, but it got people’s hair up. That wasn’t the intent, but our bad. So it is not just the issue of not wanting to appear to be whining about this or evoking sympathy, it’s also the issue of not wanting to appear to be in any way threatening.
“And that’s hard given the history.”
Chipman himself is still searching for the right words here. He remembers first-hand the emotional roller coaster those involved with the “Save the Jets” campaign rode in the mid-1990s and said, “I can honestly say to our fan base, I understand whatever that is — whatever that feeling is.”
If not by his words, he should be judged by his actions.
In the face of declining ticket revenues, the Jets have continually upgraded and modernized Canada Life Centre and have now invested as much in building improvements as they spent on building it, according to Chipman. They also handed out $119 million in long-term contract extensions to Connor Hellebuyck and Mark Scheifele in October. They extended Nino Niederreiter in December. And they got a jump on the competition by trading a first-round pick to Montreal for Sean Monahan during the All-Star break.
They are a team spending to the salary-cap ceiling and turning over every rock necessary to build a Stanley Cup contender. They’re doing so with the belief that fans will see the promise in what they’re building and start returning in greater numbers. And they’ve been encouraged by some recent numbers, including 13,786 against San Jose on Feb. 14 and 14,707 against Minnesota on Tuesday.
“I would hope that if you walked around any one of the four floors here or over in hockey ops and said, ‘What is it? What is it you are trying to be? What is True North and the Jets?’ I would hope that without much hesitation, most people would say, ‘A source of pride,’” Chipman said.
“That’s what teams ought to be, and that’s what we’re trying to convey to people. We’re trying to be something you can be proud of.”
(Graphic: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic, with photos from Trevor Hagan / Associated Press and Darcy Finley / Getty Images)
The Chris Chelios chronicles: Celebrities, saunas, beers and Blackhawks brilliance
Scott Powers and Mark Lazerus
Feb 23, 2024
115
Ask one of Chris Chelios’ teammates to tell some stories from the old days, and you’re likely to get a big laugh that becomes an uncomfortable laugh that becomes a telling silence.
“Is this X-rated or for families?” former Chicago Blackhawks great Steve Larmer said after going through all three of those phases.
Chelios is as legendary for his off-ice exploits as he is for his on-ice brilliance. He was always the best at everything, from chugging beers to lugging weights to plugging gaps to slugging opponents. Only eight players (and only one defenseman) in NHL history played more games than Chelios’ 1,651. His career started in 1983 with the Montreal Canadiens and didn’t end until 2010 with the Atlanta Thrashers, when he was 48 years old. Even now at 62, he looks like he could log 25 minutes without breaking a sweat.
Chelios’ No. 7 will be retired at the United Center on Sunday. Rather than rehash all his accomplishments — three Norris trophies and three Stanley Cup wins among them — we turned to those who knew him best to gain insight into what Chelios was really like.
Chelios the physical freak
Eric Weinrich, teammate, 1993-99: The legend was real, I guess. When we played in Chicago, we had a sauna and the guys would be in there, and he’d be in there doing pushups for half an hour. He just did some unorthodox training methods. It seemed to work for him.
Steve Smith, teammate, 1991-97: I’ve sat beside him in the sauna and watched him bike (inside the sauna), for sure. I was completely exhausted and laying out almost cold, and there he is still riding.
ADVERTISEMENSteve Larmer, teammate, 1990-93: He was a specimen. He was like a freak of nature. He was not normal, physically or mentally. A rink rat through and through. His workouts were off the wall at the time and so far ahead of what everybody else was doing. It was uncanny. I rested in the summer; he worked out. He did all kinds of stuff out in California — paddle-boarding and on-the-water workouts, hiking up mountains, running up mountains, biking up mountains. He worked out with a guy in L.A. for years. Nobody did that back then. And then all of a sudden, there was a whole bunch of guys working out with that guy, doing what Cheli was doing. He was so far ahead of everybody else from that standpoint.
Gary Suter, teammate, 1993-98: There was one time we played an afternoon game for the Blackhawks, then Chelios, myself and Bob Probert jumped on a plane after the game and flew out to San Diego because the Packers were in the Super Bowl that year (1998), and I was a Packers fan. We went to the game, had a good time and took the red eye back to Chicago. We had a practice the next morning at Johnny’s IceHouse, 11 a.m. or whatever. They heard that some of the guys went out to the Super Bowl and they were gonna bag-skate us. They thought they were really gonna get us. But Chris and I were the first ones in all the conditioning drills. We were running on fumes, but we pulled it of
Chris Chelios still takes hockey seriously. (Bruce Kluckhohn / NHLI via Getty Images)
Weinrich: (They) flew back on the red eye, got back for practice in the morning. It wasn’t an easy (practice). Typical Cheli, about a two-hour practice and his hair wasn’t wet, had a little ring of sweat on his chest on his shirt, but the rest of him was dry. I just don’t know how he did that, but he was just so efficient as a skater, kind of a phenomenal athlete.
Pat Foley, longtime Blackhawks broadcaster: I remember vividly playing golf in the summertime with a bunch of those hockey players. You know how golf goes, you play your 18 holes, then most guys adjourn to the 19th hole and wait to talk about what they did or didn’t do. Cheli almost never came into the 19th hole, and it was always because he was going to skate somewhere. Now this is a guy that played more than anybody in the league at that point. He played every other shift and he loved the game and he couldn’t get enough of it, but in the middle of freakin’ July, he was going to skate again.
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Caley Chelios, daughter and Blackhawks broadcaster: He’s like the Energizer Bunny. He doesn’t sleep; he does the same thing every day. We tried to get him a Peloton and stuff to do at home and he was like, “No thanks, I’m gonna go to the Russian banya (sauna) every morning. I’m gonna spin, do 300 push-ups and sit-ups, and then cold tub and go home.” That’s his day, every day. And then he hits the town hard. He has all these friends. He loves to go out, he doesn’t like to stop. You’d think at 60, he was probably gonna taper down a little bit. But he kind of jazzed it back up. I don’t know if he has a fear of slowing down.
Chelios the competitor
Ed Belfour, teammate, 1990-97: He was playing 40 minutes-plus most of the games. He played a lot of minutes. (Mike) Keenan would play him all the time.
Weinrich: He could play 60 minutes if he had to. I think between him, Scott Stevens and Mark Messier, probably the three most competitive guys I’ve ever seen play.
Mike Keenan, Blackhawks coach 1989-92: First of all, he was a fierce competitor. I can tell you this, when we would work in practice, he would work so hard, his lips would turn purple. That was a great example for the rest of the team. I can honestly tell you the culture of the Blackhawks changed dramatically in a positive sense with the acquisition of Chris.
Larmer: He was stubborn. He would die on the hill trying to do it his way. Thing is, he was probably right 90 percent of the time. He would do anything — anything — to win a game. There were no rules. Playing against him, he was dogged. He was dirty. He didn’t cross the line a whole lot of times, but he certainly got to it many times. Let’s just say he knew how to use his stick well — not enough to get a penalty, but enough to irritate you to the point you wanted to retaliate. He was a very smart player that way. He was one of those guys who was much more fun having him on your team than it ever was playing against him.
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Eddie Olczyk, fellow Chicagoan and 1984 Olympic teammate: He was as fierce a competitor as there ever was. He made Paul Bunyan very proud over the years — he had that ability to take your arm, your leg and your ankle, and oh, you know what, I’m gonna get your fingers, too. And you’re not going to do anything about it. He was awesome. The legend certainly lived up to the hype.
Weinrich: There were times when we needed a change of momentum, and he’d go after somebody and start an altercation. Again, it didn’t matter who it was, how big the guy was, his reputation of being tough, he did what he had to do to change the momentum of the game or have an effect or impact on the game. (And) it wasn’t just any old player. It was somebody pretty tough, and Cheli would get him down on the ice. He’d strangle a guy. He just had this unbelievable grip strength. He’d get the guy in a position where it wouldn’t be so much throwing punches — just grabbing somebody and putting them into this hold.
Denis Savard, teammate 1994-97, traded to Montreal for Chelios in 1990: He was so hard to play against. Probably the toughest guy to play against my whole career that I had to play. After we got traded, I remember the first game we played against each other, I scored a goal in Montreal. The next thing I know, my helmet is flying off my head. Every shift (he was slashing me). I looked at him and go, “Really?” It was my line: “Really, you’re going to keep doing this?” At some point, you try to keep your composure, but at some point I’m going to hit him back because I never sat back that way. I didn’t. At the time, I was trying not to get into the penalty box. He never got a penalty for it. Those days, you could whack as much as you want. Today, Cheli would be spending 30 minutes in the penalty box.
Olczyk: Everyone knew who he was (in Chicago youth hockey). The one thing you heard about whenever you heard about Chris Chelios was, “Oh, my gosh, this guy, he can play left-handed AND right-handed.” And he was a tough customer, so of course, a lot of guys wanted to know if he can throw ’em (punches) with his right hand AND his left hand. You better be prepared for it. So it was way better to be his teammate.
Foley: I don’t remember seeing any other player do this with any other regularity, Cheli did it with some regularity — he’s a right-handed shot, he was at the blue line and the puck was coming to him swiftly to his left side, he would just reverse grips on his stick and f—ing pick the puck up left-handed and play it as a left-handed shot. I don’t ever remember seeing people do that, but he did.
Brent Sutter, teammate, 1991-98: The thing with Cheli, he could play any way you wanted to play him, too. He’s probably the best defenseman I know of that had such a great stick. You could never beat this guy one-on-one. It was almost next to impossible. The best thing was just the way Cheli played every game. The consistency of the way he played and the player he was, was always there. Chelios never had nights off. He never took a night off. … He knew exactly how he needed to play and how he had to play, and that’s what he brought every night. He knew how to play the game of hockey. He was kind of an old-school kind of hockey guy, you might say, but if he was playing in today’s game, he’d be a tough player to play against. He could play in any era the way he played.
Larmer: We were playing L.A. one night, and he was good friends with Larry Robinson, who was playing for L.A. at the time. In the old (Chicago) Stadium, the two benches were side by side, so both defensive units would be right there on the bench at center ice. Second period, Larry comes off the ice and puts his helmet up on his head and looks over at Chris, and he’s sticking his thumbs in his ears making faces. Cheli was doing it right back to him. Then Mike (Keenan) saw it and that was the end of it for Cheli. His night was over. I don’t think he got on the ice again the rest of the night. After the game ended, he was the first one down the stairs into the dressing room. The rest of us are coming down and all you hear is yelling and screaming coming out of Mike’s office. After Cheli was done and everything, the door was open. There was this hockey stick sticking out of the ceiling of Mike’s office. Mr. (Bill) Wirtz (former Blackhawks owner) walks in and goes, “Hmm, what’s this doing here?”
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Keenan: We had a conversation (last year) out of the blue, he called me. He said he’s still upset about Pittsburgh beating us for the Stanley Cup. That’s how competitive this guy is. Like, how many years later, he’s calling the coach and still saying we had a chance to beat them.
Savard: We played in a fantasy camp last year; he wanted to win so bad. I said, Cheli, we’re playing in a fantasy camp. “I know, I don’t care.”
Chelios the lover of life
Larmer: There’s two sets of rules in the world — the rules and the laws of the land that we all live by, and Cheli’s rules. He was always a fun guy to be around. He’s a real man’s man.
Suter: I was a senior in high school in 1982, and he was a freshman at Wisconsin, playing for the Badgers. They brought me in for a recruiting trip, and he was the chaperone. He was in charge of taking me around and, of course, we hit all the bars and hotspots and afterparties. Just had a great time. I blacked out early. The problem was, I had to get up early the next morning to meet with the coach, Badger Bob Johnson. I must have looked Pale Rider going in there. It’s my official visit, and I was pretty hung over. The point is, we hit it off right away, and throughout our careers, we were real close.
Belfour: We were a close-knit group. We always did stuff, go out for dinners. I remember one year, Cheli flew us all to Madison. We had a great time in Madison together and had a lot of fun. It’s a tight-knit family we had with the Blackhawks and our group. I miss those days, for sure.
Caley Chelios: He used to have this group, they called themselves the Malibu Mob. And had these hats that were insane. It was John McGinley; I used to watch “Scrubs” growing up. And Tony Danza lived down the street from us in California and his daughter and I were best friends over the summers and we’d go there. John Cusack, D.B. Sweeney and John McEnroe all were pretty much in California at one point, too, and were part of the Mob. It was a crew. We had Cup parties, so there were some crazy people at all the Cup parties. We (kids) were shielded a little bit more from the party action when you have Tom Hanks or Arnold Schwarzenegger, all these people coming over to have a pic with the Cup. It was fun. He has a great crew.
Weinrich: It was kind of an exciting time in Chicago. The Bulls were great then. People just sort of hung around the city. There were always celebrities at the games. Cheli and the crowd always seemed to go hand in hand. So we got firsthand to meet some pretty cool people at that time. … He was good friends with a guy named D.B. Sweeney. He’s buddies with the guys in Pearl Jam. Smashing Pumpkins were pretty popular at the time. Jeremy Piven was at a lot of games; for some reason, he’d end up sitting next to my wife a lot. John Cusack was at a bunch of games. Chris Farley was there quite a bit. That crowd was really fun, and they were really interesting people. It was a cool time.
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Suter: Chris and I and a bunch of guys loved to have beer. I don’t know if that’s just old-school or what. But no matter how much we had, he’d also be the first one at the rink the next day, in the sauna, riding a bike, sweating it out. He loved the morning skates. Just loved being on the ice whenever. That’s what made him special. He was just a freak of nature.
Keenan: They (enjoyed themselves off the ice), but I told them, don’t try to trick a tricker. Because I knew what they were up to all the time. But I gave them the freedom when it was time to, and I asked them to go to work when it was time to work. I think they respected that. I think they liked that. They respected my judgment of them and my trusting of them. That worked well. That group was a really great group that we had. They had a lot of energy and competitiveness on the ice as a group, and as a team they were really tight. Then off the ice, they were the same. They had a coach that worked with them in a context of that spirit. OK, I understand you want to have fun, but you have to understand when you did that — when we come back, we’re working. Not just working, we’re here to win, and that’s what we did.
Olczyk: Those (off-ice) stories, we’ll keep behind closed doors. Like the line in “Slap Shot”, we’ll keep it all within the boundaries of good taste. Thank you, Jim Carr.
(Illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Getty Kellie Landis, Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
EverettMike
FIRE DON SWEENEY INTO THE SUN
Winnipeg Jets ownership sounds the alarm on attendance: ‘Not going to work over the long haul’
Chris Johnston
Feb 23, 2024
963
WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Behind a large desk in an office tower with a view out over True North Square, Mark Chipman is working the phones.
Chipman is chairman of the Winnipeg Jets. A local businessman who got caught up in the failed movement to save his city’s NHL team three decades ago, he later fixed his gaze on bringing big-league hockey back to one of the smallest markets in North American professional sports and defied the odds by actually making it happen.
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On this day, he’s still fighting to ensure the Jets work in Winnipeg by taking on a cumbersome task: making personal calls to those who have let their season tickets lapse.
The organization’s once-solid foundation seems to again be quaking beneath Chipman’s feet. Even playing out of the NHL’s smallest permanent arena, which holds 15,225 fans for hockey games, the Jets are drawing just 87.4 percent of capacity this season, the third-lowest mark in the 32-team league. Their overall average attendance of 13,306 is the lowest of any NHL team other than the Arizona Coyotes, who are playing in a college arena. And that’s despite the Jets being one of the top-performing teams in the Western Conference.
Winnipeg’s season-ticket base has suffered a 27 percent decline in just three years, falling from approximately 13,000 to just under 9,500, according to the Jets.
“I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t say, ‘We’ve got to get back to 13,000,’” Chipman said. “This place we find ourselves in right now, it’s not going to work over the long haul. It just isn’t.”
One by one, Chipman gathers first-hand information from the people who are no longer walking through the doors of Canada Life Centre after filling the building for 332 straight sellouts upon the Jets’ return in October 2011.
Why did they stop coming?
What would convince them to return?
It’s difficult to imagine another member of the NHL’s Board of Governors rolling up their sleeves to this degree, but failure to turn the situation around could threaten the 2.0 version of the Jets’ ability to remain healthy and competitive in the long-term, Chipman said.
The Jets’ health, on and off the ice, is an extremely sensitive subject in a city where heartbreak has been felt before. The Jets left town once already — for Arizona, perhaps the ultimate symbol of hockey’s southern expansion — only to be reborn with a second chance. Losing the team again would likely mean the end for top-tier pro sports in Winnipeg.
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So Chipman is looking for opportunities to win back business by offering invitations to former ticket buyers to return for a game of their choice before the end of this regular season.
“They’ve been really very friendly,” Chipman said of his calls during an exclusive interview with The Athletic this week. “When I first started making them, I wasn’t sure what I would encounter, but they weren’t hard calls. They were, ‘Look, I want to come back, but I’ve got two kids, 9 and 11. They’re playing hockey. I can’t come to that many games.’ And I get it. We understand.
“Had another guy annoyed over the fact that we had a discounted ticket and beer offering last year. Fair enough. You’re a full-season ticket holder. Somebody in your section got in on a promotion we did. Our bad.
“It’s a whole range of stuff, but pretty much everyone I spoke to today is coming back to a game.”
Mark Chipman greets fans at a game in 2013. (Marianne Helm / Getty Images)
Amid the swirl of excitement that accompanied Winnipeg’s return to the league after a 15-year hiatus was a warning from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.
“It isn’t going to work very well unless this building is sold out every night,” he said.
That statement didn’t initially pop the way it does when read in the current context, because in the spring of 2011, there was a fervor around the reborn Jets. When it was announced that the Atlanta Thrashers were migrating north to Manitoba, 13,500 season tickets were sold in 17 minutes on a Saturday.
Much had changed since the original Jets left town, starting with the construction of a well-appointed downtown arena and the introduction of a league-wide salary cap that tied player salaries to overall revenue.
What remained the same was the fact that Winnipeg would need to punch above its weight to compete with teams based out of much larger markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto. With a population of 749,607, according to the 2021 Canadian Census, there’s a friendly feel in the air here: the kind of place where Chipman routinely hears opinions on the team’s roster while pumping gas and where, yes, you may end up receiving a phone call from the NHL franchise’s chairman about renewing your season tickets.
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Chipman said he feels “indebted” to the NHL for the city’s second chance.
He first made a presentation to top league officials in January 2007 during a meeting that included representatives from Las Vegas, Seattle, Houston and Kansas City, and ultimately saw Winnipeg pushed to the front of the queue when the Thrashers came up for sale and relocation four years later.
While NHL officials continue to believe in the viability of the market — “We wish all of our clubs were selling all of their tickets for every game, but I can’t say there’s a level of concern,” deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Athletic during the NHL’s Board of Governors meeting in December — Chipman acknowledged that the Jets are on the radar at league’s head office for reasons they’d rather not be.
“They pay attention,” he said. “They see the numbers. They see where the league’s at and where we’re at. And we’re an outlier right now. So, rightfully, they want to know, what are you doing? What’s going on? What happened and what are you doing about it?”
Bettman is scheduled to visit Winnipeg on Tuesday and get a firsthand look at the situation, meeting with key corporate sponsors and potentially even addressing fans directly before that night’s game against the St. Louis Blues.
That comes as the organization’s sales team has started shifting its attention to the 2024-25 season. For the first time this season, the Jets will give priority on playoff ticket purchases to those who put down a deposit on season seats for next season. And they’ve grown more flexible with options covering a select number of games.
Currently, the team has a season-ticket base of roughly 9,500 — an unsustainably low number, according to Chipman. The team saw a big decline in renewals when the pandemic hit and has endured subsequent drops after the past two seasons.
They are now feverishly trying to reverse the tide.
When Jets fans fill Canada Life Centre, as in this playoff game against the Golden Knights, it’s a formidable place to play. (Jason Halstead / Getty Images)
To understand how the Jets got here, you must first understand what made their lengthy sellout streak unique to begin with.
They managed to fill the building for more than a decade despite having just 15 percent of their season seats purchased by businesses. That lags well below the norm in a league in which some teams sell 50 percent of their tickets to corporate interests, according to Chipman.
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What that means in practical terms is, in Winnipeg you need real people to spend real money on 41 home dates per year. And the way they did that initially was through a significant number of individuals going in on shared season-ticket packages with friends and family — a market reality that Chipman viewed as a strength until seeing what happened when a member or two of each group moved out of town or ran into a situation in which they could no longer afford to keep up their end of the arrangement.
“It was like a bubble that burst on us,” Chipman said. “We had what I thought was this strength in numbers that didn’t turn out to be.”
In response, they’ve tried to rally local business leaders.
The Jets have recently recruited 34 well-connected men and women and asked them to tap into their networks to try and generate new business. Chipman said he’s been extremely forthcoming with that group about the challenges of operating an NHL team. The idea is to not only tug at civic pride but also reinforce the positive economic and psychological benefits that the presence of the Jets brings to the community.
“What we try to convey to those people is, we’re trying to win,” Chipman said. “And in order to win or be competitive, we’ve got to keep up. We will never match the Leafs’ gate. It’s really remarkable. We can’t match that. But Edmonton really outperforms us, and that’s harder to accept, right? Because we think of ourselves as equals.
“I know Edmonton is a bigger city and they have that pedigree of all those Stanley Cups, but I think most people in Winnipeg and most people in Edmonton look at one another (with) a healthy respect.”
There’s a natural inclination for him to look around the league and draw these comparisons. Unlike the NFL or NBA, which have massive national television rights deals, the NHL remains a gate-driven league. And elsewhere, business is booming.
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Chipman specifically mentions the success of markets that were once referred to as “non-traditional,” like Nashville, Dallas, Carolina, Florida and Las Vegas.
“The game’s growing,” he said. “You’ve seen it. You’ve had a front-row seat. Those markets in the U.S. that we used to look down upon, they’re fun, and they’re alive.”
To some degree, the lingering effects of the pandemic and an inflationary environment account for what’s happened in his own backyard, but that doesn’t tell the entire story. The Jets have the second-cheapest tickets in Canada, according to Chipman, and they plan to institute only a negligible bump in cost for some sections, with a decrease in others, next season.
Chipman doesn’t shy away from the organization’s role in the current state of affairs.
They’ve heard complaints from customers ranging from the high costs associated with transferring tickets between members of a group to frustrations about the Jets’ previous unwillingness to sell smaller packages. They’ve also had to build up a sales staff that wasn’t needed in the days when the tickets basically sold themselves.
“We’ve had to reinvent ourselves,” Chipman said. “For 10 years, we weren’t a sales organization; we were a service organization, and I’m not sure we were that good of a service organization, to be honest with you.”
As the Jets’ business took a turn in recent years, one of the toughest parts about addressing the problem has been talking about it at all.
There’s a sensitivity to the fact that people in the community are struggling. There are more important things than professional hockey. And as the team found out when it evoked images of the 1996 Jets departure as part of a ticket-selling campaign dubbed “Forever Winnipeg” last spring, even the vague notion of a looming threat to its viability wasn’t received well.
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“Because of the history, it’s a bit of a tinderbox,” Chipman said. “In retrospect, we weren’t trying to be dramatic, but it got people’s hair up. That wasn’t the intent, but our bad. So it is not just the issue of not wanting to appear to be whining about this or evoking sympathy, it’s also the issue of not wanting to appear to be in any way threatening.
“And that’s hard given the history.”
Chipman himself is still searching for the right words here. He remembers first-hand the emotional roller coaster those involved with the “Save the Jets” campaign rode in the mid-1990s and said, “I can honestly say to our fan base, I understand whatever that is — whatever that feeling is.”
If not by his words, he should be judged by his actions.
In the face of declining ticket revenues, the Jets have continually upgraded and modernized Canada Life Centre and have now invested as much in building improvements as they spent on building it, according to Chipman. They also handed out $119 million in long-term contract extensions to Connor Hellebuyck and Mark Scheifele in October. They extended Nino Niederreiter in December. And they got a jump on the competition by trading a first-round pick to Montreal for Sean Monahan during the All-Star break.
They are a team spending to the salary-cap ceiling and turning over every rock necessary to build a Stanley Cup contender. They’re doing so with the belief that fans will see the promise in what they’re building and start returning in greater numbers. And they’ve been encouraged by some recent numbers, including 13,786 against San Jose on Feb. 14 and 14,707 against Minnesota on Tuesday.
“I would hope that if you walked around any one of the four floors here or over in hockey ops and said, ‘What is it? What is it you are trying to be? What is True North and the Jets?’ I would hope that without much hesitation, most people would say, ‘A source of pride,’” Chipman said.
“That’s what teams ought to be, and that’s what we’re trying to convey to people. We’re trying to be something you can be proud of.”
(Graphic: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic, with photos from Trevor Hagan / Associated Press and Darcy Finley / Getty Images)
Literally exactly what people said was going to happen and why Winnipeg couldn't sustain an NHL franchise.
AngryMilkcrates
End of an Era
- Jun 4, 2016
- 17,634
- 28,475
Would be hilarious if they get moved to Atlanta.
Would it?
Houston or -- I'm not making this up -- Salt Lake City.
I hate NHL owners.
TCB
Registered User
MarchysNoseKnows
Big Hat No Cattle
- Feb 14, 2018
- 9,897
- 19,954
SLC would support a team big time. Will be a great add one way or another.
- Nov 2, 2012
- 1,454
- 2,990
SLC is an interesting market but hard to say no to Houston given the size of its media footprint (#8) its natural rivalry with the Stars and its fit with the NHL's warm weather growth strategy
In either case the chances of Quebec getting a franchise grows ever dimmer
In either case the chances of Quebec getting a franchise grows ever dimmer
Eddie Munson
This year is my year. I can feel it. ‘86 baby!
- Jul 11, 2008
- 6,747
- 2,163
Donnie Shulzhoffer
Rocket Surgery
This friggin league doesn’t need more teams.
Over the volcano
Registered User
They should move to Buffalo.Winnipeg Jets ownership sounds the alarm on attendance: ‘Not going to work over the long haul’
Chris Johnston
Feb 23, 2024
963
WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Behind a large desk in an office tower with a view out over True North Square, Mark Chipman is working the phones.
Chipman is chairman of the Winnipeg Jets. A local businessman who got caught up in the failed movement to save his city’s NHL team three decades ago, he later fixed his gaze on bringing big-league hockey back to one of the smallest markets in North American professional sports and defied the odds by actually making it happen.
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On this day, he’s still fighting to ensure the Jets work in Winnipeg by taking on a cumbersome task: making personal calls to those who have let their season tickets lapse.
The organization’s once-solid foundation seems to again be quaking beneath Chipman’s feet. Even playing out of the NHL’s smallest permanent arena, which holds 15,225 fans for hockey games, the Jets are drawing just 87.4 percent of capacity this season, the third-lowest mark in the 32-team league. Their overall average attendance of 13,306 is the lowest of any NHL team other than the Arizona Coyotes, who are playing in a college arena. And that’s despite the Jets being one of the top-performing teams in the Western Conference.
Winnipeg’s season-ticket base has suffered a 27 percent decline in just three years, falling from approximately 13,000 to just under 9,500, according to the Jets.
“I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t say, ‘We’ve got to get back to 13,000,’” Chipman said. “This place we find ourselves in right now, it’s not going to work over the long haul. It just isn’t.”
One by one, Chipman gathers first-hand information from the people who are no longer walking through the doors of Canada Life Centre after filling the building for 332 straight sellouts upon the Jets’ return in October 2011.
Why did they stop coming?
What would convince them to return?
It’s difficult to imagine another member of the NHL’s Board of Governors rolling up their sleeves to this degree, but failure to turn the situation around could threaten the 2.0 version of the Jets’ ability to remain healthy and competitive in the long-term, Chipman said.
The Jets’ health, on and off the ice, is an extremely sensitive subject in a city where heartbreak has been felt before. The Jets left town once already — for Arizona, perhaps the ultimate symbol of hockey’s southern expansion — only to be reborn with a second chance. Losing the team again would likely mean the end for top-tier pro sports in Winnipeg.
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So Chipman is looking for opportunities to win back business by offering invitations to former ticket buyers to return for a game of their choice before the end of this regular season.
“They’ve been really very friendly,” Chipman said of his calls during an exclusive interview with The Athletic this week. “When I first started making them, I wasn’t sure what I would encounter, but they weren’t hard calls. They were, ‘Look, I want to come back, but I’ve got two kids, 9 and 11. They’re playing hockey. I can’t come to that many games.’ And I get it. We understand.
“Had another guy annoyed over the fact that we had a discounted ticket and beer offering last year. Fair enough. You’re a full-season ticket holder. Somebody in your section got in on a promotion we did. Our bad.
“It’s a whole range of stuff, but pretty much everyone I spoke to today is coming back to a game.”
Mark Chipman greets fans at a game in 2013. (Marianne Helm / Getty Images)
Amid the swirl of excitement that accompanied Winnipeg’s return to the league after a 15-year hiatus was a warning from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.
“It isn’t going to work very well unless this building is sold out every night,” he said.
That statement didn’t initially pop the way it does when read in the current context, because in the spring of 2011, there was a fervor around the reborn Jets. When it was announced that the Atlanta Thrashers were migrating north to Manitoba, 13,500 season tickets were sold in 17 minutes on a Saturday.
Much had changed since the original Jets left town, starting with the construction of a well-appointed downtown arena and the introduction of a league-wide salary cap that tied player salaries to overall revenue.
What remained the same was the fact that Winnipeg would need to punch above its weight to compete with teams based out of much larger markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto. With a population of 749,607, according to the 2021 Canadian Census, there’s a friendly feel in the air here: the kind of place where Chipman routinely hears opinions on the team’s roster while pumping gas and where, yes, you may end up receiving a phone call from the NHL franchise’s chairman about renewing your season tickets.
ADVERTISEMENT
Chipman said he feels “indebted” to the NHL for the city’s second chance.
He first made a presentation to top league officials in January 2007 during a meeting that included representatives from Las Vegas, Seattle, Houston and Kansas City, and ultimately saw Winnipeg pushed to the front of the queue when the Thrashers came up for sale and relocation four years later.
While NHL officials continue to believe in the viability of the market — “We wish all of our clubs were selling all of their tickets for every game, but I can’t say there’s a level of concern,” deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Athletic during the NHL’s Board of Governors meeting in December — Chipman acknowledged that the Jets are on the radar at league’s head office for reasons they’d rather not be.
“They pay attention,” he said. “They see the numbers. They see where the league’s at and where we’re at. And we’re an outlier right now. So, rightfully, they want to know, what are you doing? What’s going on? What happened and what are you doing about it?”
Bettman is scheduled to visit Winnipeg on Tuesday and get a firsthand look at the situation, meeting with key corporate sponsors and potentially even addressing fans directly before that night’s game against the St. Louis Blues.
That comes as the organization’s sales team has started shifting its attention to the 2024-25 season. For the first time this season, the Jets will give priority on playoff ticket purchases to those who put down a deposit on season seats for next season. And they’ve grown more flexible with options covering a select number of games.
Currently, the team has a season-ticket base of roughly 9,500 — an unsustainably low number, according to Chipman. The team saw a big decline in renewals when the pandemic hit and has endured subsequent drops after the past two seasons.
They are now feverishly trying to reverse the tide.
When Jets fans fill Canada Life Centre, as in this playoff game against the Golden Knights, it’s a formidable place to play. (Jason Halstead / Getty Images)
To understand how the Jets got here, you must first understand what made their lengthy sellout streak unique to begin with.
They managed to fill the building for more than a decade despite having just 15 percent of their season seats purchased by businesses. That lags well below the norm in a league in which some teams sell 50 percent of their tickets to corporate interests, according to Chipman.
ADVERTISEMENT
What that means in practical terms is, in Winnipeg you need real people to spend real money on 41 home dates per year. And the way they did that initially was through a significant number of individuals going in on shared season-ticket packages with friends and family — a market reality that Chipman viewed as a strength until seeing what happened when a member or two of each group moved out of town or ran into a situation in which they could no longer afford to keep up their end of the arrangement.
“It was like a bubble that burst on us,” Chipman said. “We had what I thought was this strength in numbers that didn’t turn out to be.”
In response, they’ve tried to rally local business leaders.
The Jets have recently recruited 34 well-connected men and women and asked them to tap into their networks to try and generate new business. Chipman said he’s been extremely forthcoming with that group about the challenges of operating an NHL team. The idea is to not only tug at civic pride but also reinforce the positive economic and psychological benefits that the presence of the Jets brings to the community.
“What we try to convey to those people is, we’re trying to win,” Chipman said. “And in order to win or be competitive, we’ve got to keep up. We will never match the Leafs’ gate. It’s really remarkable. We can’t match that. But Edmonton really outperforms us, and that’s harder to accept, right? Because we think of ourselves as equals.
“I know Edmonton is a bigger city and they have that pedigree of all those Stanley Cups, but I think most people in Winnipeg and most people in Edmonton look at one another (with) a healthy respect.”
There’s a natural inclination for him to look around the league and draw these comparisons. Unlike the NFL or NBA, which have massive national television rights deals, the NHL remains a gate-driven league. And elsewhere, business is booming.
ADVERTISEMENT
Chipman specifically mentions the success of markets that were once referred to as “non-traditional,” like Nashville, Dallas, Carolina, Florida and Las Vegas.
“The game’s growing,” he said. “You’ve seen it. You’ve had a front-row seat. Those markets in the U.S. that we used to look down upon, they’re fun, and they’re alive.”
To some degree, the lingering effects of the pandemic and an inflationary environment account for what’s happened in his own backyard, but that doesn’t tell the entire story. The Jets have the second-cheapest tickets in Canada, according to Chipman, and they plan to institute only a negligible bump in cost for some sections, with a decrease in others, next season.
Chipman doesn’t shy away from the organization’s role in the current state of affairs.
They’ve heard complaints from customers ranging from the high costs associated with transferring tickets between members of a group to frustrations about the Jets’ previous unwillingness to sell smaller packages. They’ve also had to build up a sales staff that wasn’t needed in the days when the tickets basically sold themselves.
“We’ve had to reinvent ourselves,” Chipman said. “For 10 years, we weren’t a sales organization; we were a service organization, and I’m not sure we were that good of a service organization, to be honest with you.”
As the Jets’ business took a turn in recent years, one of the toughest parts about addressing the problem has been talking about it at all.
There’s a sensitivity to the fact that people in the community are struggling. There are more important things than professional hockey. And as the team found out when it evoked images of the 1996 Jets departure as part of a ticket-selling campaign dubbed “Forever Winnipeg” last spring, even the vague notion of a looming threat to its viability wasn’t received well.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Because of the history, it’s a bit of a tinderbox,” Chipman said. “In retrospect, we weren’t trying to be dramatic, but it got people’s hair up. That wasn’t the intent, but our bad. So it is not just the issue of not wanting to appear to be whining about this or evoking sympathy, it’s also the issue of not wanting to appear to be in any way threatening.
“And that’s hard given the history.”
Chipman himself is still searching for the right words here. He remembers first-hand the emotional roller coaster those involved with the “Save the Jets” campaign rode in the mid-1990s and said, “I can honestly say to our fan base, I understand whatever that is — whatever that feeling is.”
If not by his words, he should be judged by his actions.
In the face of declining ticket revenues, the Jets have continually upgraded and modernized Canada Life Centre and have now invested as much in building improvements as they spent on building it, according to Chipman. They also handed out $119 million in long-term contract extensions to Connor Hellebuyck and Mark Scheifele in October. They extended Nino Niederreiter in December. And they got a jump on the competition by trading a first-round pick to Montreal for Sean Monahan during the All-Star break.
They are a team spending to the salary-cap ceiling and turning over every rock necessary to build a Stanley Cup contender. They’re doing so with the belief that fans will see the promise in what they’re building and start returning in greater numbers. And they’ve been encouraged by some recent numbers, including 13,786 against San Jose on Feb. 14 and 14,707 against Minnesota on Tuesday.
“I would hope that if you walked around any one of the four floors here or over in hockey ops and said, ‘What is it? What is it you are trying to be? What is True North and the Jets?’ I would hope that without much hesitation, most people would say, ‘A source of pride,’” Chipman said.
“That’s what teams ought to be, and that’s what we’re trying to convey to people. We’re trying to be something you can be proud of.”
(Graphic: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic, with photos from Trevor Hagan / Associated Press and Darcy Finley / Getty Images)
- Status
