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Attendance

What Gives, Pacers Fans?

by Jared Wade on January 12, 2012 at 2:02 pm · 12 comments

It’s no secret that the Pacers have watched their fan base recede steadily since the 2004 brawl and the ensuing years of arrests, suspensions and mercurial personality displays. It was presumed, however, that things were getting better. The team has rid its rosters of all nearly all vestiges from those dark days (Lance Stephenson’s new-age police trouble notwithstanding) and is now populated by seemingly moral young kids who should be much easier to root for. Moreover, with a 7-3 record, the team is tied for third place in the Eastern Conference.

So what’s the deal with this report last night from the Indianapolis Business Journal?

Don’t have official attendance yet for tonight’s Pacers game, but I can’t imagine there are more than 6,500 in the Fieldhouse.

Sports business reporter Darrell Rovell captured the void by publishing the image above.

So what gives, Pacers fans? We know you didn’t go to the team’s second home game in Conseco Fieldhouse during last year’s playoffs against the Bulls. But that’s understandable. The playoff berth for a sub-.500 team must have caught many off guard, and it’s tough to get too excited about a match-up against the conference’s best team.

But how about now? Why aren’t you showing up to watch this team in 2012?

UPDATE: Here’s some more context from Pacers supporter and sometimes 8p9s contributor Tony Laurenzana.

Attendance was around 10K last night, but what Rovell didn’t mention was that traffic was blocked and people were late

2 inmates attempted to escape the Marion Co. Jail and police blocked traffic around the Fieldhouse which caused many to be late.

10,000 is still pretty bad and Pacers season ticket holder David Peck was there and acknowledged that the Fieldhouse “empty,” but the photo, which was right before tip, probably makes it look more vacant than it was.

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Fair-Weather Fans Don’t Flock to Game 4

by Ronald Eugene on April 24, 2011 at 8:47 pm · 18 comments

Looking at the crowd, you wouldn’t know they played in Indiana. (Photo: Jonathan Daniel/Getty)

Game 4 had to have felt exactly like reliving Game 1 to the Indiana Pacers. Improbably leading the entire game, some of it by double-digits, the Indiana lead began to diminish rapidly over the final three minutes of the game: a 10-point cushion turned into a one-possession game in a hurry. All the while, the red sea of fans was going bananas, attempting to spur its team to a thrilling comeback win.

The problem is that Game 4 took place at Conseco Fieldhouse. In a series in which the Pacers dropped the first two contests despite leading for almost 60 minutes, the blue and gold returned to Indy for what they thought would be home-court advantage. It turned out to be a home invasion.

Thursday’s crowd was split 50-50 with the Pacer faithful out-performing their red counterparts. Returning from perhaps the most encouraging losses in franchise history, fans showed up rowdy and ready for Game 3. Post-game quotes from Frank Vogel and Danny Granger as well as the opinion of one ESPN Chicago columnist who said the Bulls playing Indiana “had to feel like swimming with their clothes on” ran across the bigscreen.

Make no mistakes about the fact that Chicago fans were definitely in attendance at Thursday’s Game Three in extraordinarily high numbers. At times, the atmosphere resembled that of a high school game: each side alternated cheers and jeers for its preferred group. But it was a neutral environment at worst where the Pacer players at least got to enjoy the confines of a familiar locker room and well-known path to work.

Game 4, however, was nothing short of embarrassing for anyone who cares about Indiana basketball. What was reported as maybe a 50-50 crowd by TNT (or so I heard, since I actually bought tickets to the game and therefore did not watch it on TV) was more like 70-30. And a meek 30% at that.

Pacers officials would have been better off not allowing the pre-game introductions to take place. Chicago fans nearly took the roof off as the announcer said the names of their starters, then rained down boos on the Pacers’ five. The crowd was silent for most of the game, during which the Pacers held a double-figure lead, then nearly spurred the road team to a massive comeback.

Such an overwhelming migration of fans from Chicago has created quite a bit of media attention. The search for explanations has yielded a few reasonable answers. Comparable tickets were often ten times more expensive in the United Center as in Conseco Fieldhouse. The Bulls had a better season. Many IU and Purdue students are from the Chicago area. And so on. And so forth.

One Pacers worker, tossing out t-shirts at the end of the first quarter, shared how disgusted he was at the turnout to me, mainly because the lovely lady who escorted me to the game and I were the only Pacers fans in the section. “I don’t see how anyone can say this isn’t a fair-weather city,” he said.

Indy Star columnist extraordinaire Bob Kravitz essentially excused the turnout, writing that the Pacers can’t “field a lousy and thoroughly irrelevant team for four-plus years, then have a decent two months and expect the entire city to reach for its wallets.”

Who’s right? Well, both to an extent.

Kravitz is correct in that the Pacers, after a season that saw a coaching change and ended eight games under .500, can’t expect the kind of fan support that a team with the league’s best record (and six previous championships) enjoys. But at the same time, tickets were available the week of the games for $13 apiece. It isn’t exactly a second mortgage.

The truth is that Indianapolis, unlike Chicago or New York, is a fair-weather sports city. Kravitz using the Indianapolis Colts 1999 playoff game against the Tennessee Titans is a perfect illustration. That year, the Colts finished 13-3, but Tennessee fans filled the RCA Dome in large numbers (although not as bad of a ratio as this series’ Game 4).

Some may say that Indianapolis did not have a deep connection yet to the Colts with the team only having been in town since 1984 and having yet to experience any real success at that point. And what a fine justification that is if we ignore the fact that Tennessee had only had a football franchise for three years in 1999 with the previous two being 8-8 seasons.

The truth is that Indianapolis is a fair-weather sports city. And it was humiliatingly on display to a national audience in Game 4.

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Cap & Trade: Next Year’s Salary Cap May Not Drop As Far as Originally Expected

by Jared Wade on January 25, 2010 at 3:16 pm · 0 comments

The best news for Pacers fans this weekend was not even Pacers-related. It was about money. Specifically, it looks like the NBA’s wallet is not being quite as hard hit as expected so far this season.

This season’s NBA ticket revenues have not dropped as much as the league office projected over the summer. The league expected a 6% to 7% drop in ticket sales but there has been only a 1.7% drop to date.

Attendance is flat or ahead of last season’s pace in the majority of NBA arenas. The Nets and Pistons account for most of the small overall decline.

“The fact that we’re only down roughly 1.7% going into tonight’s games, I’m pleased about,” said NBA executive Chris Granger.

This doesn’t mean that the NBA is out of the woods yet, but if tickets keep selling ahead of the league’s preseason projected pace then next year’s salary cap, which was expected to drop significantly, will likely not fall to such a degree that the Pacers will forced to make salary dumping moves that they wouldn’t otherwise make.

shrinking NBA salary cap

The background here is that, given the ongoing economic downturn, the NBA expected its revenue to plummet across the league this year. Not only was attendance expected to dwindle, but this in addition to other sluggish returns had league execs projecting a significant drop in the all-important “basketball-related income” figure, which is what defines what the following year’s salary cap (and, thus, the luxury tax threshold) will be.

The 2009-10 salary cap had already gone backwards (from $58.7 million per team in 2008-09 to $57.7 per team this year), but that drop was not nearly as large as what the NBA was projecting for 2010-11. (See chart on right, courtesy of ESPN, for recent cap history.)

As ESPN’s Marc Stein put it:

The official league memorandum, obtained by ESPN.com, forecasts a dip in basketball-related income in the 2009-10 season of 2.5 percent to 5 percent, which threatens to take the 2010-11 cap down some $5 million to $8 million from last season’s $58.7 million salary cap.

A significant drop for the luxury-tax threshold is also projected going into the summer of 2010. If basketball-related income drops by 2.5 percent in 2009-10, league officials are projecting a 2010-11 salary cap of $53.6 million and a luxury-tax line of $65 million.

If BRI, as it is referred to in the NBA, decreases by 5 percent, teams would be looking at a $50.4 million salary cap and a luxury-tax line of $61.2 million in 2010-11.

“Teams should be aware of this projected BRI decrease,” reads the memo, “and plan accordingly.”

That “plan accordingly” aspect is what many small-market fans have been fearing. If the 2010-11 luxury tax was set at $61.2 million, the Pacers would already be over that line by around $4 million. Being over by that much would require owner Herb Simon to not only hand over $8 million to the league but would hit him with the proverbial “double-whammy,” as he would also be forfeiting the end-of-the-year payout that all the teams below the luxury tax receive — a check that equaled nearly $3 million last year.

So if next year’s luxury tax was set as low as the worst-case league projection of $61.2 million, Herb and Larry Bird would either (a) have to find a way to shave more than $4 million off of next year’s payroll (something easier said than done), or (b) bite the bullet and lose roughly $11 million (the $8 million in tax Herb would have to pay in tax plus an estimated $3 million he would not get back from the league.) For a guy who has been hemorrhaging untold tens of millions over the past decade on this team, asking him to lose another #11 million — on top of the $65 million for next year’s projected salary and whatever other enormous costs it takes to run an NBA team — would be asking quite a bit.

Fortunately, however, that mini-doomsday scenario looks a little less likely in lieu of recent news.

And that’s a good thing

A very, very good thing.

In related news, the Pacers are one of the teams whose attendance has dropped — so things aren’t all peaches and cream in Conseco. Last year, Indy averaged a lowly 14,182 fans per home game, which was worse than every other franchise except for Memphis (12,745) and Sacramento (12,571) . This year, reported attendance is down to 13,578 (which is, again, “worsted” by only Memphis and Sacto). The difference of 600 people per night isn’t going to make or break the team’s bank account, but any drop is obviously a negative and if the team gets worse — a definite possibility — than so might the attendance numbers.

So while today’s leaguewide ticket sale numbers are good — and the more important — news, let’s also be sure to keep an eye on the team’s ticket sales.

pacers conseco attendance

She’s still here at least. (Photo: Sam Riche)

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