Have the Canucks priced out their own fans?

0:00America leads the world in medicine development. It matters. We get new medicines first nearly three years faster. Five million Americans go to work because we make medicines here at home and not relying on other countries keeps us safe. But China is racing to overtake us. Will we let them or will we choose to stay ahead? When America leads, America cures. Let's tell Washington to keep us in the lead. Learn how at americancures.com. Pay for by farma. Welcome back to show. It's been a rough season for the Vancouver canox and now the mood around the team may be hitting a new low. The playoffs are long out of reach. The trade deadline has come and gone and with just a handful of home games still left, attention is turning to something that would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Empty seats set Rogers arena. Now tickets are still priced at a premium at least on paper, but on the resale market they're going for a fraction of that. So is this just a normal cycle of a disappointing season or the canox drifting into a deeper problem with their fan base? We're joining us now to talk about this

1:02issue is Patrick Johnson, sports commons for the Vancouver Sun and the province and he wrote a fabulous article on the issue as well. Patrick, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Well, Patrick, let's start with the mood around the team right now. How bleak does it feel around the canox as the season winds down? Well, actually, this is a good news and I've just posted a story on our website and it'll be in the paper tomorrow, but the players themselves, they're through the trade deadline, you know, this is who they have now, right? There's no such anxiety of who will be here tomorrow. Will I be here on Saturday morning? And they're very much focused now. Okay, we now have to build the next thing. And so it's very much sort of, let's pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, move forward, see what we got. You know, young guys like younger guys like MacSafson, you know, obviously in the 20s, but comparatively younger to what we've had before. You know, saying listen, we've got to be pumping each other up on the bench, got to be sporting each other. And you know, Brock Bester saying they very much, that's what they need from the younger

2:02players. The guys are a little less experienced. Those guys in many ways do have to leave the way. They have to have to sort of be the new group and the veterans are there to support them and get through it. So that is the good news, I would say, and all this. What's gone wrong this season that the team ended up here in your mind, though? Well, I mean, it's a multi-factor thing, but the base of it all was losing, you know, the best defenseman in team history, right? Like, when we years, as we now know, it was very clear. And I thought, going back to last season, I was wondering about how long he'd be here. But in the end, he saw sort of the right and the wall of the future was elsewhere and wanted to go. So he got out. You know, you can go all the way back to the coaching change lot of springwork talk at deciding not to renew a contract and then leading on his own terms, which is pretty unusual and hockey. Yeah, in the end, the group that they thought would be the group to take them to sort of the promised land, going back five, six seasons and obviously had a lot of bumps to get

3:06to where they got to in 2024 when they had their exciting run in the playoffs. That group just didn't work out and it kind of fell apart in pretty spectacular fashion. And we're now sort of standing in the aftermath of that where they're trying to rebuild, trying to build up essentially, but be a new group around some probably young stars that we don't even know who they are yet. But it is certainly like I said, so go back to square one and that's the overall challenge as I was writing about in my story. I had Richard Usman on the show just the other day and he walked into the studio here with an Ottawa Senators jerseys from the game afterwards. And he's long time Ottawa Senators fan and I'm told that reportedly that game felt heavily pro Ottawa. Can you give me a sense of what it what it feels like as a fan and that's the empty seats, just the energy in the in the in Rodgers Arena itself? Well, it is weird. I mean, you know, the there's still obviously the hardcore that are there, but a lot of people just have kind of

4:06turned off. I mean, season ticket holders have their tickets and they pay for for the season. And traditionally a lot of those people would often be able to resell those tickets to other, you know, people who are keen to go or what have you. Right now it seems to be visiting fans, although if you look at the schedule to come, there's not a lot of huge traveling fan bases. And as I noted in my story, like I think we've gotten used to the idea that a leaf game or a much old Canadian game would have a big visiting crowd in the building. There was a game recently with the oilers, I think right before the Olympic break, you know, right before the Olympic break, the oilers huge crowd there and he kind of gave something and they're they just trying to sell tickets that isn't fan because there's all the spare spare capacity. And then of course, as you said, on Monday, you get Ottawa, which has never been the case before. I mean, obviously the centers have been around for 30 some years, but not exactly a team you think of as having fans all over the place. And so to me, that was such a tell of sort of what's available, what's there, what you're trying to get, you know, in terms of in the building,

5:07you're just trying to sell tickets at that point. And it is a strange, obviously strange, what, like the visiting fan make noise. They're excited to be there. They're excited to see their tea. And in the past, when certainly the connoct had been winning in an early game or a habs game, you would get a fair amount of pushback. But with these visiting teams lately, that was not in the case because the building has been mostly not connox fans. And that's tough for the moment. And I do think that could be tough for the long run. And do you think the management's getting it like there has to be not a rebuild, but something that rebuilds the excitement, the desire to get the hair hands on a connox ticket once again and go. I mean, it seems to me, not that it's losing this, they're losing the city, but certainly there's some challenges before them at this moment. Yeah, I mean, there's a few, there's a few different things going on here. And one of them is, is an overall shift. And I didn't touch on this too much my story, but an overall shift in, in how sports teams around North America, certainly. And I think perhaps even in

6:09Europe, if you look at top-end soccer teams, how they approach the, the sort of project of off ice, what are we doing here? And there's this notion of what they call premium. So whether that seems to take a hold of the traditional fence or people who get access to their special sweet, special restaurants, special venues within the building and they're paying a price to do that. Teams are trying to aim, I've been told up to 30% of their businesses just from that. And so whether that's just literally people getting in the door because they're high volume spenders or what have you, there's been a big folks on that. You can see that in Rogers. But the truth is that you still have the regular run of the mill fence and at the bulk of the people in the building. And that's the bulk of your relationship, you know, the day-to-day kind of thing. And certainly, you know, you want to make people sticky. And obviously, you've got your season ticket holders and you want them coming back. But I have long said this, that, you know, those people are incredibly important and so are your casual fans who may become a wonder to you in the year.

7:10You want them to feel like they're valued, that there's an exchange of not just money, but experience. And if you just view them as bags of money, you know, to be extracted from, I don't know, especially when you're not winning. I don't know how sustainable that is in terms of creating sticky, repeatable fans. And I do suspect they're running into that. Now, we are hearing all kinds of examples of cheap tickets. You know, certainly if you're a university student, they brought back their student rush nights, which is something from, you know, when I was at UBC 2025 years ago, was a big appeal of getting in the building, a cheap way to get in the building. But, you know, the price of food, the price of drinks is sky high still. So there's sort of this valuation, well, if we can at least get people in the building, those bad money. Patrick, I'm going to have to cut you off right there. We've just run out of time, my friend. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Yeah, take care, Jeff. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course,

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