Seattle's NHL Season Ticket Drive Hits 10,000 in 12 Minutes

Published on 1-Mar-2018 by J Square Humboldt

NHL    NHL Daily Update

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Seattle's NHL Season Ticket Drive Hits 10,000 in 12 Minutes

No wonder the late Barry Ackerley did everything he could to tunnel the NHL coming to Seattle.

Dude remembered the early days of the NBA's SuperSonics, when they'd routinely be outdrawn by the Western Hockey League's Seattle Totems.

Ironically, Ackerley's short-sighted deal with the city to renovate the Key Arena in 1995 in a way that excluded the minimum NHL specifications ultimately did in the Sonics themselves.

 

Suffice to say the city fathers and private enterprise finally found each other with mutual interests and a pending renovation plan for Key Arena is now viable for the NHL.

An ownership group quickly surfaced that accepted the fact that their expansion fee will be $150million more than what Bill Foley paid for his Las Vegas franchise.

 

It's no secret that advance research is a requirement before numbers of this magnitude solidify.

So when the NHL authorized the prospective Seattle ownership to prove fans will commit to buying at least 10,000 season tickets, dudes were confident enough to set a higher bar than Foley did in Vegas:

 

Well, the hockey crowd was definitely right back.

As in waiting for the starting gun, which they did. Like Usain Bolt:

 

They now expect to cut off sales at 33,000 so walk-ups will still be available when the doors open in 2020.

In a way, this shouldn't be a surprise:

  • Seattle's a hi-tech city with a multitude of transplanted citizens, many of whom come from NHL hotbeds;
  • Seattle's metro area is a relatively high-income region because of the tech sector; and
  • Seattle's only three hours' drive from Vancouver and could easily attract fans from the Lower Mainland who can't get tickets for Canucks games.

 

In other words, Seattle NHL hockey will be in good shape.

To date, it's surpassed everything the Vegas Golden Knights did. But the real work in that regard is yet to come.

The city will however, be ahead in Stanley Cups won.