Little commented upon during this Capitals’ Renaissance is how many people around town are taking notice:
Lots.
Suddenly, the downtown rink is packed. The team’s new look is a red-hot hit with the home crowd. The sports section fronts of the city’s newspapers are each week ablaze in full-color hockey victory imagery. Even the TV numbers are up. There is buzz about hockey in Washington.
“This is a good hockey market,” Jim Van Stone, Capitals’ Vice President of Ticket Sales and Service, told me during the Caps’ 3-2 win over the Rangers on Sunday. “There’s a huge amount of hockey fans in the region, and what we’re trying to do is convert them into Caps’ fans.”
It’s a big tent revival taking place in Chinatown, and the numbers of the converts are growing.
The Capitals’ players are doing their part out on the ice, and the team’s marketing professionals have devised some creative sales packages that have fueled an impressive surge in group and partial plan sales. But “the buzz” about hockey in town — the one driving thousands more into the stands, toward the souvenir stands and stores, and before their television sets at home — seems to have its origins in a remarkable and broad confluence of positive events for the organization.
Go back to last June and the launching of the revamped look of the team. Caps’ fans long hungered for a return to the team’s original red, white, and blue colors, and the team not only listened but carried out the makeover in an appealingly clean and restrained contemporary design that, judging by its red wave prevalence within Verizon Center, appears to be popular across gender and age.
There’s an understated, classic look to the new look that seems synchronous with its founding predecessor — perhaps best illustrated among the array of fashionable baseball caps seemingly on every hockey head in Verizon Center. January home games most especially seemed to showcase that Santa Claus trafficked thick in these parts in Capitals’ red, white, and blue. This new look is largely responsible for the team’s merchandise sales being up 40 percent this season over last, according to Tim McDermott, Capitals’ Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer.
It’s great to look marvelous, but now the Caps’ are a good looking winner. Washington loves nothing so much as a front- runner, and a Caps’ ticket sales staff that for years had to pitch an at times far-off seeming future can now point to a present that includes things like sweeping the Ottawa Senators and vying for first in the Southeast division. Paid admissions this season, McDermott told me, will be up 15-20 percent over last season.
And if winning weren’t enough, the team’s sales staff gets to market a set of young stars catching the notice of the entire hockey world.
“We are fortunate to have what we call our four young guns,” McDermott told me, alluding to Alexanders Ovechkin and Semin, Nicklas Backstrom and Mike Green. “You can honestly and very objectively sit back and say that for the next 10 years this is a team that’s going to compete for the playoffs, this is a team we hope that will compete for the Stanley Cup,” he added.
So the Caps are not only winning but doing so with young star power. It’s a fantastically appealing headlining quartet — a Rat Pack on skates — and a core of the team positioned to play together many years. Who wouldn’t be lured in by that? Hence, Gang Green, Ovie’s Crazy 8s.
And to this already potent marketing mix management has added the immensely quotable and feel-good story of hockey perseverance in Bruce Boudreau. He dresses a bit oddly, he’s chock full of fabulous tales, he never fails to deliver a money quote after games, and from his gaudy stint of winning in Hershey he’s vested in most of the Capitals’ young core. He just seems the right guy for the part.
Home crowds here typically start out discouragingly small in October and November, no matter the team’s forecast or its early season success. Then, come January, after the Redskins’ season is completed, there’s long been a healthy improvement in puck patronage. But there’s something different about this season’s mid-winter attendance improvement: its vastness.
Ovechkin in Caps shirt - photo by Sovietsky SportThe Caps’ three most recent home games have all seen attendance solidly above 17,000 — and for two of those dates, the opposition came from the Southeast division, long a yawning bane to HockeyWashington’s Old Guard who feasted on the high nutrition fare of Patrick Division foes for years. Last Friday night, fully 45 minutes before the Caps squared off against Carolina, the number of tickets available to F St. walk-ups for seats in the 100 and 400 levels was
zero.
Nada.
As if Hanna Montana was in the house.
Perhaps even more interesting was a new demographic among them: college students. No fewer than 2,300 area collegians took part in the Capitals’ Student Rush program last Friday night, by which they can access tickets at admission rates even college kids can afford: $25 for seats in the lower bowl, $10 upstairs. How did the Caps lure thousands away from campus keggers on a Friday night? With winning, but also with aggressive and well-placed branding, particularly in social networks like Facebook and MySpace.
“Our street teams have actually been on the campuses,” Van Stone told me, alluding to Caps’ staffers who this season have regularly been out promoting the team at Metro stations, area businesses, and now college campuses, distributing t-shirts, pocket schedules, and even hot dogs to promote $1 Dog Night.
Verizon Center as the world’s largest frat house? You have to admit, the Friday night atmosphere in there has changed — and for the better — of late. And while college-budget-friendly admission rates to see Alex Ovechkin are inducement indeed, the hordes of collegians may also be responding to the team’s youth: in their ages, the likes of Ovechkin, Backstrom, and Mike Green, among others, are their peers.
The swell in popularity isn’t restricted to game attendance, either. According to McDermott, Comcast viewership for Caps’ broadcasts is up 37 percent this season over last. That viewership is virtually certain to increase during the stretch run, too, particularly if the team remains in contention for the Southeast title.
It was predictable that the team’s winning ways would garner some level of interest from sports Washington, but not to be overlooked in the equation is the perhaps redefining, landscape-altering, sublime performance of Hart Trophy candidate Alexander Ovechkin. The Caps and this city simply have never seen his likes in the team’s sweater before. Nor for that matter has the rest of the league.
Sunday afternoon a camera broadcasting a feed to Verizon Center’s state-of-the-art, high definition center-ice scoreboard honed in on Ovechkin on the Caps’ bench. Ovie being Ovie, as soon as he realized he was on camera, he beamed that gap-toothed grin of his and the arena erupted. Of course soon thereafter he scored a goal, and the team came back from a 2-1 deficit and prevailed in overtime against the Rangers. Ovechkin’s hold on HockeyWashington — which is expanding — is irrefutable. And thanks to Caps’ management early in 2008, that courtship will endure past next decade. Van Stone and McDermott confirmed for me that fans are purchasing ticket plans for this season — as well as putting down deposits for next — while citing the new deal for Ovie as a reason.
So with the arena virtually full, revenues up all around, and the team in first place these days, the branding work must largely be finished for the Caps, right? Wrong, claims McDermott.
“What I’ve learned is that we have to be prepared for success, to capitalize on it,” he told me. “That means that we can’t ‘go dark’ once the season is over. We have to find a way to connect with hockey fans here even in the offseason. That’s what we’re thinking about now, ideas for doing that.”
“The rebuild is over,” the team’s owner conspicuously claimed at the onset of training camp last fall. Now it appears that Ted’s team — the one on the ice as well as the one off it — is buiding an infrastructure to make Washington a durably built hockey town. Tickets, if you can believe it, are already becoming scarce.
A bit more backfile before I lay my bombshell of a theory on you. I was able to arrive in the Verizon Center press lounge reasonably early in the 5:00 hour Tuesday. It was a zoo in there, as you might imagine. There were a lot of friendly faces and plenty of new arrivals as well. It being a game 7, I wanted to survey the pros — the men and women who get paid to work hockey as a beat, and especially the veteran ones who’ve worked these decisive games before — to try and gain a sense of how they thought this remarkable series would conclude.
