Quote:
Originally Posted by phil235
Kitchener was looking at a 9000 seat arena, hence the figure in my post.
Not sure what stats you are looking at in terms of attendance. The 67s were over 7000 per game every year until 2011-2012, when they still averaged 6500. They had a big drop off when they moved to Kanata, and they haven't yet recovered since coming back to Lansdowne (all coiinciding with bad, bordering on terrible teams and almost no marketing), but there are a lot of signs that they are trending higher. They ended the season with 3 of 4 games over 5000, as were both of their playoff games.
With a good team next year, or even a few high end prospects to watch, those numbers will be up significantly. It would be very shortsighted to build a new arena for the 67s with a capacity of less than 6-7000 people. The cost of one of those would probably be closer to the high end of the $50-100 million range that I cited.
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http://www.hockeydb.com/nhl-attendance/att_graph.php?tmi=7314
I can't vouch for the source.
It is hard to make a comparison because the city has not published clear figures on how much they spent on Lansdowne, but $50-70M seems to be the going rate for recent OHL (Windsor, Kingston, St. Catherines) areans and that would have yielded a new arena that would have had lower maintenance and longer lifespan (also could have allowed a more symmetrical stadium with better site lines). The steel problem alone was $23 million (for which the city has had to offer a loan guarantee).
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