The Ottawa Senators will play their biggest game since the 2007 Stanley Cup Final on Tuesday night, and there’s a good chance they won’t do so in front of a sellout crowd.
The Senators remain one of the NHL’s worst draws, and they’re having problems selling all of the tickets to Tuesday night’s Eastern Conference finals Game 6 against the Pittsburgh Penguins, a game the Sens must win to force a Game 7 against the Pens.
As Sportsnet points out, there are still plenty of upper-deck tickets left for what might be the final game of the season at Canadian Tire Centre.
“It’s very disturbing, however, knowing the players and coaches they will be trying their hardest for Ottawa,” owner Eugene Melnyk told the Ottawa Sun.
The Senators averaged nearly 17,000 fans per home game in the regular season, which is a decent number on the surface. However, that’s just 87.4 percent of the arena’s capacity, tied for 24th in the NHL — behind untraditional markets like Nashville, Tampa Bay, San Jose, Anaheim and Dallas. That figure just barely eclipsed the Florida Panthers, a team notoriously hammered for attendance, and Ottawa’s attendance percentage was by far the worst of the league’s Canadian teams. For some context, the next worst Canadian team was Vancouver, which sold 97.9 percent of its tickets.
Canadian Tire Centre is located about 20 minutes outside of downtown Ottawa without traffic, and rush hour obviously makes that trip a little more difficult. But teams around the NHL and all of sports deal with similar issues all the time.
Thumbnail photo via Dan Hamilton/USA TODAY Sports Images
