Agreed.
Tampa Bay (one of the top teams in the league, only drawgin 83.7% capacity)
Why do you use % capacity? The St Pete Times forum (cap 19,758) is one of the largest arenas in the NHL. If we were playing in Nashville (17,113) or San Jose (17,562) or any other smaller building, but were still drawing mid 16k on average, would it really matter that our % capacity was a few percentage points higher? If we played in Nashville's arena, our % capacity would be 97%, if in San Jose's building we'd be at 94%. If we were pulling those kinds of % numbers right now in our current building we'd be top 10 in the league in attendance.
Look, I wish our attendance was better, however I don't believe this is anything to be embarrassed over. In fact, I'm really looking forward to seeing it jump during our mega home stand coming up. Also, if one truly understands the demographics as well as the current economic state of the area you would be able to better grasp this franchise. It's easy to sit on a computer in Canada and look at raw numbers and make statements, but its another thing to fully understand a region and it's people and what affects those raw numbers.
Everyone agrees that the economy is bad everywhere, but Tampa, which is largely a blue collar town to begin with focuses on real estate, shipping, and tourism economically....all of which are in the crapper. There are obviously a ton of these out there but this study shows Tampa as being the second worst NHL city to find a job in, according to one web site.
http://www.careercast.com/content/10-worst-cities-find-job-0
Of NHL cities, Detroit is 2nd worst, Tampa is 4th, LA is 7th, and St. Louis is the 8th worst. Those are the only NHL cities in the bottom 10.
The top 10 best cities to find a job in includes the following NHL cities... 1. Washington DC, 2. Boston, 6. Atlanta, 7. Chicago, 8. NYC, and 9. Denver.
I'm not making claims that our attendance is good because I too think it can and should be better, but being one of the smaller markets in the NHL, as well as having one of the worst economies in the league currently, it's not all that hard to figure out how our attendance is not outstanding.