Thrashers have trouble selling seats

Attending a Thrashers game at Philips Arena this season has been a lot like riding an airline 20 years ago: The seat next to you might very well be empty.

Announced attendance for the first four home games averaged 13,943, down 1,342 per game from the first four games of last season. The Thrashers have announced two crowds of fewer than 12,000, the lowest attendance in more than four years. And the announced attendance, the number of tickets distributed, has been thousands higher than the number of people in the seats.

Thrashers general manager Don Waddell blames the schedule, the economy and a wait-and-see attitude among fans disappointed by last season and unsure what to expect from 2008-09.

“We were the only team that had four home games the first [eight] days of the season,” Waddell said. “We played on a Friday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday there, so those Tuesday and Thursday games were tough nights. If people are going to buy tickets at the start of the season, they’re not buying them for Tuesday and Thursday, they’re going to buy them on the weekends.

“Those are tough dates for us and always have been. For us, the first half of the season has always been a tougher sell than the second half of the season. We’re in a mega football area.”

But Atlanta was a football area last year, too, and last year’s first four home games included a Wednesday and a Thursday. One difference this year is the season ticket base. Fans such as Trent Wirtz Sr. of Marietta didn’t renew after the Thrashers traded Marian Hossa and finished second-to-last in the Eastern Conference.

“The dedication is not there with the general manager and the owners putting forth a team that is competitive with the other teams out there,” Wirtz said. “I had two season tickets. The guys next to me had four. They said they weren’t going to renew, either.”

After five years of owning season tickets, Wirtz now watches the games on TV. He said he might come to Philips one or two nights this season.

The Thrashers are trying to draw fans with new all-you-can-eat sections where the food at the concession stand is included in the price of the ticket. The team also recently offered subscribers to a fan newsletter 50 percent off tickets to Sunday’s game against Florida and the Nov. 6 game against the Islanders.

League-wide, the U.S. and Canadian climate of layoffs and crashing stock prices has yet to harm attendance. Season ticket sales are up 4 percent and single-game sales are up 13 percent, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told reporters last week. But Bettman admitted that if the economic slowdown gets bad enough it will hit the NHL in the pocketbook.

To some extent, that could eventually be good news for Atlanta hockey fans.

If the NHL’s revenue declines, the league’s salary cap declines with it. Any decline would leave the light-spending Thrashers well-positioned to take advantage of other teams’ need to shed salary to get under the cap. The calculus that enabled the Thrashers to acquire Mathieu Schneider from Anaheim could bring more talent to Atlanta in 2009.

“Right now, we have the third-least amount of money committed [in salaries] for next year,” Waddell said. “It’s a fine line of signing the guys you want to sign and being patient enough to be able to pick up players, [like] Mathieu Schneider. Let’s say the cap does not go up next year. There’s going to be a lot of teams that have already committed quite a bit of money next year, where there’s going to be some opportunities for teams with money to spend.”

For now, however, Waddell needs to sell tickets. He said the way to do that is to give fans a team they want to watch. The Thrashers are 2-4-2 under first-year coach John Anderson.

“We’ve got to win some games and play an exciting brand [of hockey],” Waddell said. “You always hear from the negative people in the summertime, but the positive e-mails we’re getting right now from people who’ve actually been to the games, they enjoy watching this team.

“As long as we can put together some wins, that will go hand in hand with helping us the second half. Saying that, we knew coming into the year it was going to be a tough year. We’re in a very, very tough economic climate. People aren’t shelling out the entertainment dollars as they used to.”

NEXT FOR THRASHERS

> Who: vs. Flyers

> When: 7 p.m. today

> TV; radio: Versus, 680 AM