Attendance

So this week I decided to take a closer look into Rodney Paul's article regarding attendance in the NHL. I would definitely agree with the survey regarding what people loved about hockey games. When at a hockey game one can definitely feel an increase in energy once a goal is scored or if a big hit was delivered. Also, when there is a fight the entire arena seems to go crazy. So there is no doubt the survey the NHL sent out is completely true.

The idea about the NHL losing many fans and attendance in different venue's declining also appears to be very true. Many fans just seemed to have lost interest after the season long strike a few years back and the NHL has not fully recovered since then. Being a Ducks fan in Anaheim this isn't as evident as many people are still very loyal to the Ducks and most games are still sold out. However, it is apparent when watching other games the NHL has a problem with drawing people to watching hockey. Something had to be done and the NHL did a very good job at identifying the needs.

The first thing the NHL did was decrease the size of the padding of the goalies. This was a very smart decision by the NHL as there are now many more goals. With this the TV ratings of hockey games has gone up significantly the last couple years. With this increase in television ratings, many more fans have been showing to hockey games throughout the country. Creating better scoring chances for teams has definitely helped the attendance problems at hockey games.

There is only one question i have regarding the NHL's new policy is if they knew violence in hockey is what many fans like to see, why did they seem to try to stop it? I can understand not allowing the players to go all out and kill each other, but i don't understand why they had to stricken the penalties for fighting.

Also, the idea of the NHL increasing the number of rivalry games and Canadian teams was a very smart idea. Everyone gets more thrilled about a game when its against a team they don't like. The idea of the NHL having teams play their rivals more during the regular season most definitely would increase television exposure and attendance at the games. It could also cause rivalries to grow.

Overall i feel the NHL did a great job to increase attendance in a sport thats been struggling to keep its fans. They went out and identified what fans wanted to see in games. They then went out and created change to fit what the fans wanted to see. The result of all this has been an increase in television exposure and increase in attendance. Even though attendance has been on the rise, i believe the NHL needs to continue to make change as they lost a lot of fans during the strike. Hopefully the NHL can become as or even more popular as they were before the strike.