by “From our perspective, the game has never been healthier,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman told CNBC in November. He had stopped by the network’s Times Square studio to talk about the latest team evaluations and the league’s future television and streaming deals. The outlook in both cases is generally good. “Our competitive balance and quality of play are what fuel audiences, attendance and sponsorship partnership growth – it all works together,” Bettman continued. All of this is largely true, except when it comes to the NHL’s best team, the Winnipeg Jets.
To be clear, the Jets – valued at just over $1 billion – are great where it should really matter: on the ice. Winnipeg surprised the most with its good start to the season. The Jets were 18-6-0 through the end of November and sit atop the Western Conference and the league. The 2024-25 Jets are the fastest team to reach 15 wins in a season and also the first team in NHL history to win 14 of their first 15 games. A strong team for many seasons on defense and in scoring, the Jets have now found their scoring touch, outscoring their opponents 94 to 63. It’s an exciting time to be a Jets fan, with seemingly little reason to not watching every game day.
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Still, the Jets have struggled to attract sellout crowds. With room for 15,321 fans per game in the NHL, the Jets were averaging only about 13,760 fans per game in mid-November, according to one count. That’s an increase from their average last season – 13,490 – but it’s still far from what the best team in the league could hope to be. But that’s been the story in Winnipeg for years. Since the NHL returned from the pause imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Jets have not been able to fill seats, despite the freezing of playoff-bound teams. This is a marked change from the previous nine seasons, in which the Jets played at or over capacity. What has changed for Winnipeg? Oddly, nothing.
“This is one of the questions I get asked most often when I talk to people across Canada about the possible return of the NHL to Winnipeg. Could we support it by selling out the building every night and generating enough corporate support? Paul Friesen wrote for the Winnipeg Sun in April 2011, shortly before the Thrashers left Atlanta for Winnipeg to become the new Jets. “In the short term, yes, I believe we could do it,” he wrote. But “long-term support for the NHL is a different story here. Selling seats and suites are two key elements of any NHL franchise. Friesen concluded that the company’s money would be there, but the ticket prices for regular fans would be too high.
The opposite happened. Upon their return, the Jets prioritized ticket sales to fans, including those who held tickets to the Manitoba Moose, the AHL team that had moved into the Jets’ old arena. Thousands more joined a queue for tickets online. The team sold 13,500 subscriptions in three minutes. “Mark Chipman and David Thomson may have written the $170 million check to bring the NHL back to Winnipeg, but the team’s real owners are its fans,” the Sun said. Indeed, when the newspaper surveyed its readers that spring, the majority (65.3%) said they got their subscription during the Internet rush. Twenty percent were Moose season ticket holders. Only 6.6% said their employer had been a corporate sponsor of Moose.
During nine years of sold-out hockey, corporate money didn’t seem to matter. But over time, ticket and concession prices have steadily increased, and the subscription base has declined. The Covid-19 pandemic has made the situation worse as Winnipeggers, like many others, have been hit hard by inflation. Between the NHL’s post-pandemic return and last spring, the season ticket base, once 13,500 strong, had fallen to just 9,500. Jets owner Mark Chipman told The Athletic in February , months after the team’s ownership group, True North Sports and Entertainment (TNSE), began pushing Winnipeg business leaders to promote season tickets, that those numbers still weren’t enough students. “I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t say, ‘We need to get back to 13,000,’” Chipman said. “The situation we are in now is not going to work in the long term.” It sounded like a threat.
So far, the only place the Jets appear to be headed is the playoffs. And ticket sales are apparently improving. “We are seeing growing momentum in the business world when it comes to subscription subscriptions,” Krista Sinaisky, a spokesperson for TNSE, told the Guardian by email in November. The Jets are “not relying on just any strategy” to get the team back to 13,000 season ticket holders, Sinaisky wrote, adding that “we are focused on selling more tickets to the business community and expanding new ticket packages suitable for businesses of all sizes” – an initiative that Sinaisky says “will launch in the coming weeks.”
It’s not over for the Jets, far from it. And, for the record, Bettman isn’t worried. Shortly after Chipman’s comments last winter, Bettman arrived in Winnipeg to court business people. “I don’t know why people are speculating now that we won’t be there,” Bettman wondered aloud at a news conference. “We are not acting under the sword of Damocles or on a razor’s edge,” he said. But he’s wrong there. Every NHL team, like most major sports franchises, is saddled with a dual identity, simultaneously existing as a soulless corporation obsessed with profits, revenue, Ebitda and debt – that is- i.e. the things that bring you to CNBC – and as a social entity. a more human endeavor, embodying hope, joy, sadness and community. It could be argued that the Jets, because of their dedication to supporting their fans, represent a more humane franchise than others. But because of that, the edge they use is real and thinner than most others.
