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Gary Bettman stepped in front of a standing-room-only crowd of media in the bowels of the downtown rink on Tuesday and wondered what all the fuss was about.
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The NHL commish may as well have just said, Move along, there’s nothing to see here.
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“I’m not sure why people are now speculating that somehow we’re not going to be here,” Bettman said early in a 15-minute Q & A.
On what message he was in town to deliver: “We weren’t delivering messaging today.”
As for what he yakked about with corporate types earlier in the day, it may as well have been the glorious weather.
“Everybody seems to be operating under the assumption that we’re here to address a particular need or concern,” Bettman said. “I try to get to as many buildings throughout the league in the course of every season. If you remember correctly, I was here a year ago for Filipino Heritage night. I’m here to visit.”
Of course. How silly of us all. February in Winnipeg: everybody’s go-to destination.
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The problem is Jets games are no longer go-to destinations.
An average of more than 1,000 empty seats last year has become more than 2,000 this season.
Just details, according to Bettman.
At one point his right-hand man, Bill Daly, chimed in.
“This is a team that’s widely regarded around the league as a model franchise,” the deputy commissioner said. “We wish we had 32 of these.”
Just look at all the buildings True North Sports has put up downtown, Bettman pointed out. And the plans for the north side of Portage Avenue.
Co-owners Mark Chipman and billionaire partner David Thomson have spent hundreds of millions on the place.
“For anybody suggesting the agenda for ownership is other than focused on Winnipeg is silly,” the commish said. “That’s why I’m sort of mystified at the tension that seems to have developed here.”
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The man who created the tension wasn’t in the room, of course. Too many reporters in it for his liking.
A full nine minutes into the Q & A, there hadn’t been a single mention of the reason so many were on hand.
Somebody actually had to remind Bettman of Chipman’s words from late last week.
“This place we find ourselves in right now, it’s not going to work over the long haul,” the Jets chairman said.
Chipman was referring to a season-ticket base that’s eroded like a Winnipeg curb lane in the spring. A healthy 13,000 for a decade, some 3,500 have disappeared into a pothole.
And that waiting list of 8,000-strong?
Evaporated.
“It’s not going to work over the long haul.”
“What I believe Mark means by that… he didn’t want to just be a member of the NHL,” Bettman said. “He wants to be competitive every year and he’d like to bring the Stanley Cup to Winnipeg. And so if the team is going to have the resources and the ability to compete at the highest level and spend to the cap as they have, it’s important for the building to be full.”
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Ah, so that’s what Chipman meant. He’ll stop spending to the limit on player salaries if more bums don’t fill the seats.
That’s really good for fans to know: the willingness to do what it takes to win is directly related to crowd counts.
Some 30 minutes later, Chipman confirmed that to a group of a few hundred fans who half filled a section for a “fireside chat” before the Jets took on St. Louis – Chipman, Bettman and Daly seated at centre ice.
“When we make the point about how important it is to have a really strong season-ticket base, it’s not a matter of viability,” Chipman told the crowd. “It’s a matter of our long-term health and our ability to be competitive as a hockey team. That’s really what the point I’ve been trying to make is. It’s about long-term health.”
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It was some pretty impressive backwards skating through a not-so-neutral zone of emotion he’d caused by his recent comments.
“Because we’re the smallest market, by far, and the smallest building, we rely more on the number of people that come to games,” Chipman continued. “But it’s labour intensive. It’s a lot easier to announce that we purchased the team and push a button, go on sale, than it is right now.
“It’s like one at a time, earning people’s trust back.”
You don’t do that, of course, by reminding people why the Jets left town the first time, as the organization did in that promotional campaign last spring.
And you don’t earn trust back by using words that threaten the same outcome if people, individuals or corporate types, don’t buy more season tickets.
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That’s not all he’s learned.
They screwed up, Chipman acknowledged to the crowd, by being so rigid in their policies during those 10 years of guaranteed sellouts.
“Because we were protecting a wait list for a long time,” he said. “We had run it for 10 years a certain way and we were too slow to respond to needing more flexibility, more ways to come to a game.
“I wish I could take back the mistakes we made in that regard.”
It’s changed the last couple of years, he added, drawing applause on several occasions.
Of course, he was preaching to the choir.
The devil was in all those details: the empty seats around them.
pfriesen@postmedia.com
X: @friesensunmedia
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