Since no one seems to have been prepared to challenge a statement that has been repeated about a dozen times in this thread by Bling and picked up by NYR7 and others, and in fact the statement almost seems to have passed into the realm of accepted fact by virtue of its repetition, I suppose I will do so.
To Bling and others:
Exactly where do you get the idea that ticket prices are NOT lower? Contrary to a riduculous statement made earlier by Bling, the price reductions last year (which were reductions from 2003-04 levels) were not token isolated instances. They were huge and market-wide. I could dig up a link, but I am at work. The info is out there, however. Most markets experienced reductions in the double digits. There is not a scintilla of proof that prices have even returned to their former levels.
In addition to the price reductions THAT STILL EXIST, the system has missed out on three seasons (this year, last year, and the lockout year) where inflation has not acted to increase the prices from 2003-04 levels.
As for the silly point by NYR7 about inflation not having enough time to act or some other such nonsense (and NYR7 I know you can do better), anyone who follows NHL ticket prices knows full well that the rate of inflation for tickets has vastly outstripped the rate of inflation in the economy as a whole. A conservative estimate would be that, absent the lockout and what was accomplished thereby, ticket prices would be 15% higher industry-wide than they were in 2003-04.
I won't address the silly points made earlier about "incompetent ownership". I would suggest that such views are completely uninformed and contain about an inch-deep of insight, but I don't think that it even has that. Even the most cursory analysis does not support any of Bling's contentions, as amply pointed out by Timmy and others.