The Winnipeg Jets aren’t going anywhere.
That’s the message from executive chairman Mark Chipman, who says he’s seen the buzz about the team’s less-than-impressive attendance at recent home games, but wants fans to know Jets ownership are in it for the long haul.
“We had 10 years of sellouts, and we had two tough years on the back of a global pandemic,” Chipman told 680 CJOB’s The Jim Toth Show.
“That doesn’t equate to, ‘Oh, we’re not sure if this works anymore’. What it means is we’ve got work to do to get people back — and we’ve spent a lot of time doing that.”
Recent Jets games drew around 80 per cent of capacity at Canada Life Centre in downtown Winnipeg, with Tuesday’s tilt against the St. Louis Blues drawing just over 11,000 fans — the lowest numbers since the former Atlanta Thrashers arrived in Winnipeg in 2011.
The low numbers, coupled with an ad campaign earlier this year that seemed to suggest the team could relocate without fan support, have left many worried the fate of the original NHL Jets, who decamped to Arizona in ’95-96, could be repeated.
Chipman, who worked on the campaign to save that incarnation of the team, said the “Forever Winnipeg” ad campaign was misinterpreted by some fans, and that staying in Winnipeg has never been in question.
“This team is not going to move. That ad was not intended to suggest that the team is going to move. If we were to do it over again, I guess we could’ve not used those images, and I apologize if it offended anybody,” Chipman said.
“I got into this because of the (original) team leaving. I spent a couple of years of my life working with a lot of people to keep the team here in the first place, and it was that basis upon which we set out to bring a team back.
“I guess I kind of understand why somebody would ask that question… but the circumstances were very, very different in the mid-90s.”
The current situation, he said, is less a factor of the NHL’s economics not being right for a market like Winnipeg, and more of a confluence of factors, including the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of inflation, and a smaller season-ticket buy-in from the local business community than other teams enjoy.
“It started over a year ago coming out of the pandemic, we lost a pretty good chunk of our season ticket base — largely because a lot of our base was comprised of people that had grouped together, and the pandemic had a pretty significant impact on a lot of folks, obviously.
“What we found out was if one or two of those members of a group would decide not to renew, that group would fall apart and so that happened to a pretty significant degree.
“The other thing we really learned was how few businesses hold season ticket accounts relative to our counterparts across the country. We’re at about 15 per cent, the next lowest is about 45 per cent — that’s not pointing the finger at the business community, that’s more a function of how we went on sale.
“I think if we’d gone to the business community before we bought the team and made a pitch to them, then we might have a bigger base in our business community, that is maybe a bit more resilient than our typical fanbase that partnered together to buy seats.”
On top of all that, he said, hockey fans want to see a competitive team — not an easy ask in a league that prides itself on parity, and even though the Jets are one of only a handful of clubs who have made the playoffs in five of the last six seasons, they continue to fall short of the ultimate goal: a Stanley Cup championship.
“I think fans want to see a competitive hockey team. It’s easy to say this, but it’s really hard to win in this league. It is so competitive, and… have we been as successful as we’d like to be? No, because we haven’t won it yet.”
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