With the season winding down, I figured it was a good time to take another look at attendance figures from across the NHL for the 2023-24 season. I always caveat that there is no intent here to take shots at any specific team’s fan base or paint the league in a bad light. Additionally, these are attendance numbers reported via NHL game reports. To my knowledge, the league has never provided a definition of ‘attendance’ but I have come to believe it is ‘tickets distributed.’ It’s not tickets sold, not butts in seats, it’s tickets distributed.
League-wide attendance
League-wide attendance is pretty much at pre-pandemic levels. It is slightly off of the 17,451 peak in 2013-14, but two things impacted these numbers: 1) the Arizona Coyotes’ move to Mullett Arena, and 2) the Seattle Kraken joining the league. Mullett Arena only has a capacity of 4,600, while Climate Pledge Arena’s capacity is 17,151. Both numbers bring down the league average in terms of how many people can physically attend a game.
If you exclude Coyotes and Kraken games, the average attendance across the NHL is 17,719, which would be a new high at this point in the season.
Team-by-team change in attendance
When we look at an individual team’s change in attendance, we see some different themes emerge:
- Florida is getting a significant pop from their Stanley Cup Final appearance last season, and the Panthers are backing that up with very good performance on the ice this season.
- The Blackhawks are getting a Connor Bedard bounce, despite having a worse record than they had at this time last season.
- Like the Florida Panthers, the Devils have seen an increase in attendance thanks to their playoff appearance last season and the emergence of elite, young talent like Jack Hughes.
- On the bottom of the graph, you can see the Winnipeg Jets with a drop of close to 5 percent, season over season. If you recall from last year, the Jets were the last wild card team to qualify for the playoffs and made a quick five-game exit with a series loss to the Vegas Golden Knights in Round 1.
- The Capitals and Flames are seeing drops, likely due to missing the playoffs last season (though the Capitals are right on the bubble for qualifying this season).
- Overall, there tends to be a one-season lag between on-ice performance and impact to attendance. So, by struggling last season, teams have seen drops, and vice versa.
Attendance versus sellouts
One of the challenges with looking at the changes of average attendance in the NHL is that most games are virtual sellouts, which limits how much attendance can actually increase due to capacity restrictions. Additionally, there has been a growing theme of reducing capacity, as arenas remodel to accommodate more space for exclusive experiences. To address these issues, we can look at the number of games that have sold out.
As the graph shows, the percentage of games that have sold out increased from 62 percent last season to 67 percent this season.
Here is the quantity of sellouts by team, which shows the year-over-year change from this same point last season.
Note that figuring out capacity is a manual process that varies from season to season. Some teams have a hard capacity number, such as Boston, where the Bruins consistently have 17,850 reported attendance for every game. Other teams have an inconsistent number, and some arenas have standing room that increases their attendance above a listed capacity. For classifying games as sellouts, I do not include standing-room only.
Game by game for each team
It is not the easiest visual to comprehend, but here is a look at game-by-game attendance for each team this season. For fair comps, I have excluded international and outdoor games.
There are natural ebbs and flows based on a team’s performance, and except for the Coyotes’ temporary facility, the NHL is in a healthy place from an attendance perspective. It is important to note there is limited analysis that can be done with the “reported attendance” numbers, but directionally, it starts to tell a story. Other factors such as weather (yes, weather) and obviously ticket prices impact attendance, but that data is challenging to come by for the general public.
Please let me know if you have any questions or insights into any of this analysis. Sometimes, you need to be in a particular market to know what is going on with a specific team, so feel free to share your own comments on the topic below.