Oilers Attendance: Rogers Place Has 2,171 Empty Seats

Rogers Place had a lot of empty seats on Thursday night.

The Oilers announced an attendance of 16,176 for their game against the Utah Mammoth, well short of the building’s 18,347 hockey capacity. That leaves 2,171 seats unfilled, and it is Edmonton’s smallest home crowd since the 2022-23 season, when 16,023 showed up for a Hurricanes game in October.

Daily Faceoff Edmonton’s Tyler Yaremchuk was the first to point it out, posting a photo from the upper bowl:

The Oilers drew more than 18,000 for each of their first two home games. They also entered Thursday at 5-0-1, so a slow start is not driving the drop. Last season’s smallest crowd at Rogers Place was 17,787, against the Rangers in October.

Former 630 CHED postgame host Dan Tencer weighed in on why he gave up his season tickets. He said playoff tickets were easy to resell at cost, but regular-season games were not.

Edmonton is not alone. The Golden Knights had a sellout streak end at 420 home games on Oct. 8, when 15,977 showed up at T-Mobile Arena against the Maple Leafs. Luke Fox said he had never seen so many empty seats at a Vegas game:

Yaremchuk went through the numbers on Friday’s Daily Faceoff LIVE. On Tuesday, when all 32 teams played, he said as many clubs came in under 90 percent as sold out. The Blue Jackets were at 75 percent, the Islanders 79, and the Senators and Sharks 82.

Yaremchuk talked about what is behind it and pointed at prices. “I think with ticket prices, they’ve lost the plot a little bit,” he said. “Going to games now is wildly expensive and I think the league is starting to see the effects of what I would call price gouging.”

Co-host Carter Hutton agreed that cost of living and family budgets are part of it. The NHL leans on gate revenue more than the NFL or NBA, so a run of half-empty buildings in October is a number teams will watch.