Pay For Our Failure Please

11.01.2002 | Author: Steven Ovadia | Posted in Flames

Over in Calgary, the Flames, who haven’t made the playoffs in six years, are blaming the fans for not wanting to pay to watch a subpar team regularly.
Season ticket sales are down. The Flames need to sell 600 more season tickets to qualify for the NHL’s currency equalization payments.
Flame CEO Ken King won’t come out and say he wants to move the Flames out of Calgary. Instead he throws around the vague-yet-unsaid threat of moving the team. Stuff like “We have no margin for error and we need to maximize and optimize sponsorships, ticket sales and the end of the day the best way to do that is for the team to perform well on the ice.”
Seems to me like King has had a high margin of error for the last six playoff-less seasons.
Regardless of how much the NHL gives King, he’s probably working on a way to move the Flames down here, to the US (probably to Las Vegas or Oklahoma or some other iceless city).
The thing is, if he just put a good team on the ice, he’d have no problems selling season tickets. It was like pulling teeth to get the Flames to resign star Jarome Iginla. It shouldn’t have been. You don’t have to be like the Rangers and spend a trillion dollars, but you do have to give the fans something to watch.
And King definitely shouldn’t be blackmailing the fans into buying season tickets to watch a crappy team. If the Flames could make the playoffs the fans would come. Trust me.

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