Florida Panthers Draw Record-low Attendance for Home Game

A Monday night game between the Florida Panthers and Ottawa Senators in Florida drew just over 7,000 ticket sales — a franchise low for Florida.

The Florida Panthers have never exactly been a hotbed of hockey love, but one never thought attendance to Panthers games would sink this low. Now that the team is no longer offering free tickets though, it appears the bottom line is sinking. The team reported an attendance figure drastically lower than anything in Panthers history on Monday when they hosted the Ottawa Senators at BB&T Center in South Florida.

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Bruce Garrioch at the Ottawa Sun writes that the reported attendance at BB&T Center was 7,311 tickets sold. However, the crowd looked even smaller than that once the puck dropped. Garrioch estimated that less than 5,000 fans were actually present. With that number in attendance, we might have to use the term ‘fans’ a bit more loosely to describe a Florida crowd going forward.

Just to be clear: the NHL vehemently defends its presence in Florida and refuses to publicly entertain the notion of moving the Panthers elsewhere. Yet this is what happens when the team doesn’t just give tickets away? One can only wonder what attendance would have been like over the years with no freebies.

It’s not like the Panthers barely broke this record for futility. Their previous low was more than 3,000 tickets over the figure for this game. The ‘No Freebies’ policy has seriously undermined the Panthers as a franchise and once more put them in the NHL’s spotlight as a joke.

One can only hope that the Panthers improve on their team performance some to bulk up attendance figures. At this point, filling in the BB&T Center enough so that the lower bowl is full could be seen as a great accomplishment.

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