Variations in NHL Attendance: The Impact of Violence, Scoring, and Regional Rivalries

Abstract

In recent years the National Hockey League (NHL) has put policies in place to boost attendance. Specifically, these changes have been to curb violence, increase scoring, and move to an unbalanced schedule featuring more games against regional rivals. This research looks at variations in game‐to‐game attendance in the NHL, focusing on these policy changes. It is found that violence, specifically fighting, tends to attract fans in large numbers across the United States and Canada. Surprisingly, increases in scoring, ceteris paribus, tend to depress attendance. The change in scheduling by the NHL, however, has been a success, with divisional rivals increasing attendance in U.S. cities and additional contests against other Canadian teams increasing attendance in Canada.

Attendance of Ice Hockey Matches in the Czech Extraliga

“…Accordingly, many authors have found that opening games of the season attract higher attendances. Paul (2003) observed that opening night home games in the NHL (but not the subsequent matches at the beginning of the season) had more spectators. Suominen (2009) found that as the Finnish ice hockey season progressed, the attendances decreased.…”

“… Another budget-related approach to assessing English soccer team quality was employed by Buraimo (2008), who used the team's wage bill divided by the respective division's average wage bill in the season.  T o measure short-term quality, it is common to use the number of points per match in the current season -this approach was utilized by, for example, Borland and Lye (1982) for Australian Rules football, 54 Welki and Zlatoper (1994) for US football, Forrest and Simmons (2002) for English soccer, Paul (2003) for NHL, and Suominen (2009) for Finnish ice hockey. The problem of this approach is that this indicator is unavailable for the first matches of the season -one possible, albeit problematic, 55 solution is to leave the first matches out.…”

“…Dobson and Goddard (1995) used the total number of goals scored by an English soccer team (in both home and away matches) to measure the entertainment value of the team. Paul (2003) utilized the NHL teams' previous season goal totals and current season goal-per-game averages.  Another thing that specifically ice-hockey fans might want to see is violence; variables representing violence in the NHL (measured by the number of fights, major penalties, or total penalty minutes) were used by Stewart et al (1992) and Paul (2003).…”

“…Paul (2003) utilized the NHL teams' previous season goal totals and current season goal-per-game averages.  Another thing that specifically ice-hockey fans might want to see is violence; variables representing violence in the NHL (measured by the number of fights, major penalties, or total penalty minutes) were used by Stewart et al (1992) and Paul (2003).  Match uncertainty (whether the competitors are balanced) has generally been represented by two types of variables:…”

“…3 For a great literature review, see Garcia and Rodriguez (2009). 4 Stewart et al (1992), Paul (2003), and Leadley and Zygmont (2006) investigated specific aspects of the NHL attendance. The only paper dealing with European ice hockey attendance that I managed to locate is Suominen (2009).…”