Starting in 2018-19, Prince George Cougars fans will have two fewer opportunities to see their team play at home.
All WHL teams including the Cougars will play a reduced schedule, from 72 to 68 games, as will their Canadian Hockey League counterparts in the Ontario Hockey League and Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.
The move was announced by the CHL last October and the idea is to reduce travel and give players more time for practice and school studies.
The WHL has had a 72-game schedule since 1975-76. It increased from 70 games in 1974-75 and 68 games in 1973-74. Now with just 34 home games to sell instead of 36, that means less ticket revenue for the Cougars. The good news is they will have a much more favourable schedule with fewer days on the road and mostly weekend home games. Last season at home they played 14 midweek games and had 22 weekend games at CN Centre.
"We think we'll probably spend 20 per cent less nights on the road just with how the schedule's been put together," said Cougars president John Pateman.
The Cougars are the most geographically-challenged team in the 22-team WHL, which adds to the cost of running the team. They spend more nights in hotel rooms than any other team and it costs them about $3,500 a day when they are away.
Since the new owners bought the team from Rick Brodsky in March 2014, the Cougars have continued to spend more money than they make. Sporadic attendance and three years of first-round playoff exits, coupled with the commitment of the ownership group EDGEPRo Sports & Entertainment Ltd., to run the team more like a professional franchise, pretty much sealed a red-ink fate. The Cougars announced a year ago they'd lost $2.3 million over the first three years of the new regime.
"We're certainly losing money," said Pateman. "We all think we will probably have to have a run in the playoffs, get into that second round for that to right itself. There's a real fine line with a hockey team and expenses are pretty much all fixed and getting into the playoffs dramatically affects the bottom line."
After three consecutive seasons of attendance increases under the current ownership the average attendance at CN Centre dropped substantially, from 3,626 in 2016-17 to 3,024 fans per game this past season, down an average 602 per game. In 2013-14 they averaged a league-low 1,693 just before the team was sold. Crowd counts steadily increased to 2,852 in 2014-15 and 3,122 in 2015-16. But it still wasn't enough to turn a profit.
Last May the club announced it was dropping age-based ticket pricing, choosing instead to sell tickets based on where the seats are located in the arena. That four-tiered system dropped the price of tickets in the first four rows of seats behinds the nets to $7 per game. But it also raised the price of a season ticket as much as 60 per cent for seniors who chose to sit in the most expensive seats in the main grandstand sections, prompting several hundred longtime subscribers to cancel their tickets.
The Cougars actually maintained their number of seasons subscribers because most of the fans who gave up their seats were replaced by new subscribers. The big pinch was the decline in walk-up game-day ticket sales.
"I think it's fair to say we probably didn't handle it as well as we should have because certainly a lot of the seats ended up being significantly cheaper, but some people got hit significantly in how we dealt with that," said Pateman. "If we were to do it over again we would certainly do some things differently, especially for seniors. Getting something in the mail saying you're going to be paying 60 per cent more or 40 per cent more is not a good way of handling that. This year we have rolled back the pricing somewhat."
The lower-price structure applies to 3,600 seats at CN Centre. A premium centre ice red ticket in the two main sections of the arena which starts a few seats shy of each goal line on either side will cost $650 (down from $728 last season). A seat in the blue section to the sides and behind the goal in what will be the Cougars' attacking end for the first and third periods will cost $550 ($576 in 2017-18), while a seat in the white section behind the goal the Cougars will defend for two periods will be $430 (up from $420). The cheapest seats are in the green section in the first four rows in either end and they remain unchanged at $262 each. Based on a 34-game schedule, the per-game ticket cost is $19.11 (red), $16.18 (blue), $12.65 (white) and $7.70 (green).
On average, Cougar tickets are as cheap or cheaper than any other B.C. Division team.
