I suspect some fans are also waiting to see if Detroit can get past the first round.  They don’t want to spend their money to see another early exit.

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 04/03/07 at 03:46 PM ET

$68 for a standing room ticket?  Totally brutal, I’m glad that consumers are turning their backs to this.  NHL prices are already too high having not gone down after the lock out.  Lower the prices to reasonable amounts and demand will pick up.

Posted by Guy Legend on 04/03/07 at 03:58 PM ET

Guilty as charged.  The price played some part in it, but due to both my husband’s and my travel schedules, being an hour from the Joe, and not being certain we could sell tickets we couldn’t use… we passed up on our playoff tickets.  We did the calculation.  Basically if the Wings went the entire way, we would pay as much for our playoff tickets as we did our entire season package of 41 reg. season games and 5 pre-season games.  The prices double starting with the first round, and then just keep going higher and higher after that.  I have to be honest too.  I don’t like the new CBA and I know playoff revenue funds a good chunk of the revenue sharing program.  I don’t want to be held hostage as a Wings fan to bolster markets that can’t pay their own way.  Ilitch built up the Wings from a perennial loser to a perennial contender.  I didn’t see anything wrong with that program.  And I also supported help for Canadian small market teams due to currency issues.  That’s not who is being helped by this program, but established billionaires in “small” US markets?  I don’t think so.

Posted by snafu on 04/03/07 at 04:15 PM ET

This is not surprising.  The Wings have been a non-story here in Detroit all year.  The biggest “buzz” of the year was last week during the whole “10 Year Anniversary of March 26, 1997.”  Seriously, the Wings got more attention for something (a great thing, mind you) that happened 10 years ago than anything that happened over the course of the season.

Interest in the Wings overall has certainly been waning this year. Obviously the loss of Yzerman and Shanahan have a lot to do with it. As does the Tigers’ success. As does the Wings’ recent playoff failures.

I think another reason behind it is that the team just isn’t terribly interesting or all that likeable. As the LGW threads show, many Wings fans (me included) like a team with a little toughness. With some edge to it.
This team lacks that completely. We are so far removed from the Bruise Brothers that it seems like an entirely different sport. Detroit fans like all their teams to have that blue collar, ruggedness to them. While the 97-02 Wings were certainly more skill than grit, you still had the Grind Line, Shanahan, and other elements to satisfy that need.  Holland addressed this at the deadline with the Bertuzzi and Calder acqusitions, but by that time I think the Wings had fallen so far off the radar that it didn’t matter all that much.

As for the likeableness of the team… There are some holdovers from the “Glory Years”. Lidstrom is a superstar. Solid, dependable, an incredibly talent. It’s tough to think of a more likeable professional athlete than Draper. People seem to really like (and rightfully so) Zetterberg. The guy is an immense talent and seems to do it all and work hard each night.  Kronwall is the same to a lesser extent. After that? Sure, you have guys like Maltby (who’s faded), Holmstrom (he is what he is), Ozzie, and Schneider (been great as a Wing), but I’m not sure how much excitement any of them really generate. Chelios is getting stale. The fans have soured on Datsyuk thanks to his salary issues and his lack of playoff production. Lang is incredibly frustrating to watch play. As good as Hasek’s been, he’s
one groin pull away from being shelved and it’s hard to forget his whole un-retirement fiasco. While there’s nothing wrong with Williams, Franzen, Cleary, Lebda, and those guys, again, there’s really nothing “right” about them either. I wont even go into the whole Lilja thing.

I guess my point in that long, rambling paragraph, is that besides the obvious points, I think the lack of interest in the Wings has a lot to do with the team Holland’s built. Outside of a few marquee players, there just isn’t all that much to get excited about. Us die hards will continue to watch the games, go to the games, obsess about the team, because it’s what we do and we love this team and the game itself, but for the casual fan…

Where’s the hook?

$68 for standing room tickets?  That’s outrageous.  No one wants to pay for that to watch another first round collapse.  Let’s face it, the Wings fans have, in a sense, become Atlanta Braves’ fans.  They’ve been spoiled by their team’s success and even the first round of the playoffs aren’t enough to get them excited.  If they get to the second round?  Maybe…

As a comparison, downtown was a buzz yesterday for Opening Day.  A lot of energy down here.  The Free Press had something like 15 pages or something of Tigers’ coverage this morning.  You could take all of the Free Press’ Wings’ coverage in the last three months and you’d barely get that.

I’ve always hated the “Hockeytown” monicker, always, but the overall lameness of it has never come across more clear than the lacksidasical interest in the area and the empty seats at the Joe.

Posted by Ajax19 on 04/03/07 at 04:25 PM ET

So they’re anything but fan friendly and hardly advertise?

Explain to me again how ESPN the Magazine ranked their fan relations as #5 in all of pro American sports?

Posted by Michael from Columbus, OH on 04/03/07 at 04:54 PM ET

Actually Michael, the Pistons ranked 5tha and the Wings 18th.
All you have to do is ask fans who attend games at the Joe, ask about the music and video replay.
There is virtually no promotions on TV or radio, nothing and getting access to players for interviews is also very difficult.

Posted by Paul from Motown Area on 04/03/07 at 05:14 PM ET

I think another reason behind it is that the team just isn’t terribly interesting or all that likeable.

To some extent, you can say that about practically every team, though.  I joked one before about the NHL not getting more attention because the athletes have no “street cred”  (apparently measured in weaponry, nightclub altercations, and convictions).  It is true that it’s nice to have professional athletes who aren’t getting in trouble all the time for a change, but it also makes them less interesting as characters.  I despise football, and hate Terrell Owens even more than that, but I sometimes watch games where he is playing in the hope that while he is showboating after a touchdown an opponent will hit him so hard that his helmet flies off with his head still in it, and then I can point at the decapitated, still smirking head as it bounces along the field like a football and laugh.  There aren’t any hockey players that I have anything aproaching that kind of antipathy towards.

And I think it will only get worse if player movement increases with the salary cap, making the players more interchangeable and indistinguishable.

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 04/03/07 at 05:28 PM ET

There aer some people who believe that the roster continuity the Wings have had has allowed people to become fans of the Holmstroms and Schneiders, and there are people who think Chris Chelios becoming a Detroiter is great.  Most of the people I’ve talked to like the majority of the Wings’ players, and don’t worry about players getting “stale” due to the lack of turnover.

It’s the organization. 

If you go to a playoff game, other than an elaborate introduction, you get the same old, same old, including:

A musical rotation that’s almost ten years old;

No replays of penalties, questionable goals, or big hits, but, instead, endless “pan the camera into the crowd” fillers;

Guards posted around the tunnel so that fans cannot get within eight feet of their favourite players without some unfiormed yutz threatening to throw a 12-year-old kid out of the game.

Outside the rink, the media is heavily censored.  If you want an interesting quote, a player profile that includes more than Jiri Hudler admitting that he doesn’t like purple, or a story about how Jiri Fischer is doing, you’re out of luck.

Player access is kept under lock and key—in Detroit, an open practice a year is “unprecidented access,” as are all of maybe 10 hours of oringial, inside-the-locker-room or get-to-know-your-players programming, repeated by Fox Sports Detroit endlessly for six months as that same “unprecidented access.”  Want to actually meet your favourite player, shake his hand, and have a conversation? 

Unless you accidentally bump into them in the community, you have no chance whatsoever of actually personally doing anything more than what the Wings are offering up to their fans as a “thank-you”—filling out playoff banners that will be hung in the hallways adjacent to the locker room.  They’re also giving away a poster.  A free $2 poster is considered a major giveaway around here.

Did we mention the fact that the Red Wings not only have no print, radio, billboard, or online PR campaigns (the playoffs have a single commercial and a slogan, and that’s it), and otherwise, it’s business as usual…

But also, in terms of tickets, no group, single or multiple-game discounts (you do get to choose the “Lidstrom” or “Zetterberg” mini-packs, which include…nothing except a player name on buying tickets…[and that’s crazy, guerilla marketing around here]), no free pop and a hot dog with your ticket, no “you don’t have to pay $15 to park at the Joe garage” waiver, zip. 

On top of it, as we all know, half your hard-earned dollar for the $80 upper-bowl seat goes to underwrite the losses of Bill Davidson, Alan Cohen, Craig Leipold, Jerry Moyes, Dollar Bill Wirtz, and the “Atlanta Spirit”...hell, that’s the cherry on top.

The Wings’ players and coaches are, by and large, good people, but look at Sunday’s NBC game for an example.  They showed a lovely little featurette about Kirk Maltby and his daughter that looked like it was produced in October, and it only took until an April Fool’s Day national broadcast for the piece to be sanitized enough by Hahn and the PR department to air.

The price for tickets is far too high given not only the demand, but also the bang for your buck (especially in an era where we’re losing jobs by the bucketful) and if you figuere slightly closeted organizational resentment of its own fans into the equation, and add the “business as usual, nothing special” atmosphere…

A die-hard nut like me might scrape together the bucks to go to a single game, maybe two, but there’re more than a few people that’d take up Stoney and Wojo’s dare to buy regular-season Tigers tickets or Pistons tickets instead.

Posted by George Malik from South Lyon, MI on 04/03/07 at 06:15 PM ET

As a crazy college student, I don’t have a lot of money to spend but I save mine for music, DVDs, tickets to see movies at the dollar theater, and tickets to the Wings games.

As fun as it can be to watch the game on TV, I just couldn’t pass up the chance to sit in the 2nd row, lower bowl for a playoff game even if it was $150/ticket. It’d be way more on Stubhub.

And if you’re sitting by cool people, you can have a lot of fun there. If the Wings don’t sweep or aren’t swept in the first round, I’m going to Game #5. I’m sitting in the 10th row of Section 207 (center ice, upper bowl). And yeah, I spent a lot of money, but I enjoy the game a lot more at the Joe even if they jack up the prices and the music is the same music every game for the past 5 years.

But $63 for nosebleeds and apparently $68 for SRO does seem a bit ridiculous considering those nosebleeds are like $22 in the regular season…

Posted by Christy on 04/03/07 at 10:33 PM ET

No, no, Paul.  I didn’t mean overall.

Fan Relations was my point, which the Red Wings do rank 5th in, along with a 2nd place rank in ownership (which I find rather suspect due to that somewhat recent criticism of the Illich family some months ago over the treatment of a old-time Winger and his still alive family, whose name eludes me, sadly).

Sorry about the confusion there.

Posted by Michael Turner from Columbus, OH on 04/03/07 at 11:03 PM ET

The Red Wings’ fan ranking is #5 for two reasons, and one was stated by ESPN—they do do a helluva job in terms of charity work, especially for sick kids. 

The other thing the Wings do spectacularly for their fans is win.  Sixteen years of playoff-qualifying teams and somewhere between 45-55 wins a year for that period of time, as well as the three Cups in ten years, smooth over a lot of potholes.

Posted by George Malik from South Lyon, MI on 04/04/07 at 12:41 AM ET