Portland Pirates rank last in AHL attendance
In its first year back in the refurbished Cross Insurance Arena, formerly known as the Cumberland County Civic Center, the Portland Pirates hockey team is struggling at the box office, with an average attendance of 2,787 — filling about 40% of the arena’s 6,733 seats.
The Portland Press Herald reported the Pirates’ attendance ranks last among the American Hockey League’s 30 teams, despite being in second place in the five-team Atlantic Division. The AHL’s top markets are Hershey [Pa.], with 9,314; Lake Erie [Cleveland], with 8,178; and Lehigh Valley [Allentown, Pa.], with 7,973, according to the league’s list of average attendance. Joining Portland at the bottom for average attendance are Albany [N.Y.], at No. 28 with 3,006, and Springfield [Mass.], at No. 29 with 2,909 in average attendance.
At the mid-way point of this season’s home schedule, the newspaper reported the team’s average attendance is well below the 4,000 attendance figure that Ron Cain, the Pirates’ new majority owner, cited as the minimum benchmark to maintain a viable franchise.
Last season, the team played its entire 38-game home season at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee in Lewiston during the $34 million renovation of the Portland civic center. A long and contentious battle with the civic center’s trustees over the terms of its lease finally ended in February, when both parties signed a five-year lease agreement that brought the team back from Lewiston for this season.
In the franchise’s previous 14 seasons in Portland, the Press Herald reported, the average attendance was never less than 4,000.
The team is offering a variety of ticket deals in an effort to rebuild its Portland fan base, the newspaper reported.
In September, the arena’s board of trustees selected Global Spectrum to manage operations of the Portland venue. The Philadelphia company, which also manages the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor, runs more than 125 entertainment venues across the world, which represent more than 15,000 events annually and generate $699 million in gross revenues. The firm is owned by Comcast Spectacor, a subsidiary of Comcast Corp. that also owns Front Row Marketing Services.
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