Blue Jackets Ticket Restrictions vs Tampa Bay’s
By Frank Walker
The Tampa Bay Lighting have gained a lot of attention this week for a ticketing practice. The Lightning are restricting Stanley Cup Final ticket sales based on the zip code of the credit card being used to purchase the tickets to residents of certain Florida zip codes.
The furor over this practice surprised me as the Columbus Blue Jackets have employed a similar tactic for the last few years. The Blue Jackets employ the practice once regular season single game tickets go on sale. For the first two to three days the tickets are on sale the Blue Jackets restrict ticket sales to credit cards with a billing address within the state of Ohio. This is a practice that is specifically meant to lessen the amount of fans of visiting teams with more established fan bases. The tactic has had mixed success as anyone who has gone to Nationwide Arena when the Red Wings or Penguins are in town can attest.
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For a regular season game or even for an earlier round playoff series against a regional rival this practice can make sense. When the Blue Jackets played the Penguins in last years’ playoffs the Blue Jackets used this strategy so that Ohio based fans wouldn’t be competing with Pittsburgh fans for availability of tickets. It led to an incredible energy and home rink advantage for the Jackets in that series.
But this is the Stanley Cup Final. If it was a playoff series against the Panthers by all means don’t allow the barbarians from South Florida. If there are ex-pat Chicago Blackhawks fans living in the wrong zip code why can’t they purchase tickets? All this does is drive folks to the secondary ticket market and drive up the prices for tickets which just hurts fans. The people who would buy these tickets are Blackhawks fans in any other state of the south who may never have another chance to see their team play in the post season due to the distance of all of Chicago’s post season games being west of the Mississippi.
If a situation arose where a popular western team like the Blues or the Canucks met the Blue Jackets in the Stanley Cup Final I wouldn’t be for a policy like this either. It may be a once in a lifetime chance for those fans as well. Anything that stands in the way of hockey fans building once in a life time memories and fan choice is something I cannot agree with.
Update: Originally this post incorrectly stated that people from South Florida could not buy tickets.