On Frozen Blog

Monday night the Capitals hosted their fourth and final open house at Verizon Center. My colleague Gustafsson attended one last month, and he reported being struck then by the scarcity of available seats, particularly in the Phone Booth’s lower bowl. As in, few seats available down low for any game in the 2008-09 season. Monday’s final open house afforded me an opportunity to verify this remarkable phenomenon with my own eyes — when it comes to claims of really full houses for hockey in this town, night after night, trust but verify, I say — and inquire about the strategies of a summer-long, creative and aggressive push by the Capitals’ sales staff to capitalize on the feel-very-good story that was, and is, hockey in Washington in 2008.

I met Jim Van Stone, Capitals’ Vice President of Ticket Sales and Service, at the F Street entrance to the Phone Booth near the start of the open house, briefly chatted with him about our respective summers, and then walked with him to a perch in the lower bowl. What I saw there astounded me.

We stood in an aisle between sections 100 and 121, two lower bowl sections encompassing perhaps 1,500 or more seats. Soon we were joined there by Tim McDermott, Capitals’ Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. The Capitals had placed white placards on the backs of seats that were available for purchase in the new season. Among these thousand-plus, premium-priced two sections of seats there wasn’t a single seat to be had, for a single game, during the entirety of the 2008-09 hockey season. And the scene among the rest of the lower bowl wasn’t appreciably different: a smattering of available seats — many of them just singles — dotting the purple vista like rare dandelions in a well-cared-for lawn. Couldn’t have been 50 of them in the entire lower bowl.

The movement of hockey tickets for the new season has been a very well cared for venture by the Capitals’ sales staff. Management doubled their size at the start of the summer, and the enlarged sales army went on the offensive, incorporating new technology such as clever electronic brochures featuring Comcast’s Lisa Hillary, for instance; the enthusiastic ticket-pitch participation of Capitals’ players and even Head Coach Bruce Boudreau; and last but not least good old fashioned, time-tested, cold-calling perseverance.

There was one other element integral to summer’s startling sales volume, Van Stone told me: June’s FanFest out at Kettler, scheduled hard on the heels of the Caps’ domination of the NHL Awards Gala in Toronto. Recall that the Caps arranged to have all of that hardware — Ovie’s Pearson, Hart, and Richard trophies as well as Coach Boudreau’s Jack Adams’, set out at the practice facility for photographing and admiration by FanFest patrons.

“FanFest was phenomenal for us,” Van Stone told me. “You couldn’t put a price on that for us.”

He has a point. In those four trophies, each of which is about the height of Jeff Schultz and the weight of a stuffed gear bag, the Caps were able to showcase their glorious and star-studded present and pitch a credible claim that it was in place in Washington for as long as the mind could imagine. And in honors volume, likely being added to, soon.

I asked Van Stone about Comcast’s Hillary and her participation in marketing the team, and if he thought that could be interpreted as a conflict of interest for a reporter covering the team. He offered me what I thought was an insightful perspective on the strategy.

“You know what I’ve found in hockey — everyone’s a partner with you, everyone wants our game to be successful.

“It’s a bit of a tribal mindset,” he added.

I found this latter reflection spectacularly searing in its truth. Go to a “lifer” in our sport, someone with a career vested in it, seeking help to help the game, and expect to get both hands extended out for offered labor. And a smile to go along with.

Alexander Ovechkin wants to make Washington a hockey town. And he’s well on his way. I think Hillary wants to cover a hockey town. I just want to shame Washington Post sports editors a little.

But back to the Phone Booth, fast becoming a building of burgeoning humanity. Now the Capitals of course have no direct control over allocation in the Club Level — the best-seats bane of the Booth. But just as we saw in ‘07-’08’s stretch run and in the first round of the playoffs, expect a sizable set of fannies in there this season as opposed to the vast sea of mid-level emptiness of years past. Winners with out-of-this-world superstars have a way of heating up interest in the lobbying and fat-cat perches.

More tangible, however, is the disappearance of seats in the loge levels. Those are the right-above-the-lower-bowl set at both ends of the rink (orange in your pictured seating chart). Really good seats. One end section of them is entirely gone, for the entire season.

“Do you see those three white placards on the three seats in the other end?” McDermott asked me. “That’s all that’s left.”

Just three single seats available out of the two end loge sections. (At this moment I briefly recalled Yahoo’s Ross McKeon and his call this summer to pull up the stakes on hockey in Washington. You know, for Washington’s indifference to the sport.)

Also gone, entirely, for the season: the Eagle’s Nest; and, upper bowl corner perches typically priced at about $25.

The Caps have set aside 2,000 seats for groups and an additional 2,000 seats for individual game purchases. Individual games go on sale this Saturday. Van Stone was blunt about the fate of high-profile games such as Detroit’s Saturday matinee arrival in January and the two dates with Pittsburgh: “They won’t survive the weekend,” he predicted.

All told, the Caps have a solid 10,000 “full equivalent” season tickets on the books, which doesn’t account for another 2,000 patrons seated in suites and the Club level. More could have been sold were it not for the group and individual game set-asides. McDermott told me that game-day sales and walk-ups account for an additional 3,000-5,000 purchases. When you run the numbers, the turnstiles are-a-humming: really, on no night in 2008-09 should Verizon Center draw a crowd for hockey south of 15,000. The Caps ranked 20th out of 30 teams last season in the number of tickets actually purchased (as opposed to the Susan O’Malley Attendance Meter), and on Monday night McDermott predicted the team would rank somewhere between 10th and 15th in paid attendance during the upcoming season.

More good news: Student Rush is returning. It’ll be on Thursday nights. $15 for a seat in the upper bowl, $35 for one in the lower (better be a small campus), and again this year, the students get fed, too: a Chipotle burrito comes with.

The Caps have so many new plan holders (”well over 4,000,” Van Stone said) that the team held two nights of orientation for first-timer season ticket holders out at Kettler earlier this summer. All of the benefits of being a season-long stakeholder were explained to them, and at the end of the seminar the newbies were invited to skate on the Kettler sheet with Dave Steckel, Karl Alzner, and Eric Fehr. (Symbolic of the team’s youth.)

The Caps this summer have made having a ticket stake in the team a special status. Beyond the value of having guaranteed access to seats for every game, membership, the Caps have demonstrated, indeed does have its privileges. All season ticket holders were mailed a commemorative laminated ticket for opening night against the ‘Hawks, and all were also shipped lanyards with a plastic sheathing for their tickets. VIP planners — those down hard by the glass in rows A and B — have instead of individual tickets a laminated badge akin to the all-access passes we’ve all seen worn by roadies for rock bands. Cool stuff.

If you build it they will come is the memorable refrain from a very memorable Kevin Costner sports movie. The “It” being hockey is being built in Washington, and they are coming, very much red and rockin’.