Pistons covering the (empty) red seats

[ImHeisenberg]

Could be wrong, but maybe winning/lower prices isn’t the answer? A decade of lousy basketball may have shrunk the NBA market in southeast Michigan for the foreseeable future. If that’s the case, they’ll have an extremely tough time filling that arena over the next few seasons.

They're charging prices like they're a title contender, and the team can often be extremely boring to watch, with zero ball movement and lots of guys just standing in corners doing nothing.

[Manocad]

The team sucks and the tickets are more expensive than at the Palace. That's the reason the attendance sucks as bad as it does. Stop with the "people don't want to go downtown" garbage. If you live in Saginaw, Flint, or someplace closer to the Palace and have no interest in what the city has to offer, of course you don't like the move. And there are plenty of us Oakland County residents who would much rather go downtown than to Auburn Hills. Bring the ticket prices down to what they were at the Palace and I guarantee I'll go to games that I wouldn't go see at the Palace at that price. The crowd of people I run with go downtown all the time; we don't need a game to want to go. Thus we're more inclined to go to games if the prices are right because we'd want to go downtown anyway.

[sfballa13]

Why not work with after school programs or military or any foundation to fill empty seats? Get brownie points and makes the arena look better.

That was a classic tactic used by Davidson to keep that sell out streak alive

Gores has no idea what he is doing. Im pretty sure he signed a sort of noncompete clause which states no concerts can be held at the Palace. Why would you do that?

The Palace was an awesome venue and there really wasnt a bad seat in the house

Few more upgrades (or maybe building a group of restaurants and places to hang out near there) and it would have been good to go for another 5-10 years at least

[DCintheD]

Why not work with after school programs or military or any foundation to fill empty seats? Get brownie points and makes the arena look better.

That was a classic tactic used by Davidson to keep that sell out streak alive

Gores has no idea what he is doing. Im pretty sure he signed a sort of noncompete clause which states no concerts can be held at the Palace. Why would you do that?

The Palace was an awesome venue and there really wasnt a bad seat in the house

Few more upgrades (or maybe building a group of restaurants and places to hang out near there) and it would have been good to go for another 5-10 years at least

I seriously miss the Palace. I would've gone to about 5 games this season if they were still there. I've only been to one preseason game this year..

[MrBigShot]

Until the product on the floor is worth watching we'll continue to have attendance issues.

[Snakebites]

I just assumed they must know something I didn't about the local market when they announced this move.

Because on the surface of it moving the team away from the portion of the fanbase with money to spend felt like a profoundly stupid idea. People were showing up to the Palace when the team was worth watching. The problem was the failure to build a halfway decent team-not the location, a location that had been working just fine for a long time before the team entered into a solid decade of suck.

[MotownMadness]

I've actually been noticing a lot of empty seats around the league. I think another problem is the NBA is so predictable as far as where your team is going in a season and people may only shed out that kind of money for legit top playoff teams.

[MotownMadness]

Edit: Double Post

[MotownMadness]

Wait, so LCA is selling tickets for about double the price of the Palace?

[Manocad]

I just assumed they must know something I didn't about the local market when they announced this move.

Because on the surface of it moving the team away from the portion of the fanbase with money to spend felt like a profoundly stupid idea. People were showing up to the Palace when the team was worth watching. The problem was the failure to build a halfway decent team-not the location, a location that had been working just fine for a long time before the team entered into a solid decade of suck.

The Palace was near empty when the Pistons sucked even when tickets were cheap; I was at a number of those games.

I never heard any mention of "The Pistons need to get out of the Palace; it's not working anymore." This isn't "moving away from people with money to spend" in Oakland county unless you consider another 30 minutes of drive time a real problem, which people with money to spend for entertainment don't. It was about the idea that being downtown in the entertainment district would draw bigger crowds, not to mention putting the Detroit Pistons back in DETROIT.

The team sucking is a common denominator relative to low attendance. The only difference here is that LCA ticket prices haven't dropped like the Palace ticket prices did, but it's only the first year. They can't drop prices in the middle of the year or season ticket holders will feel like they got screwed. I'll bet that ticket prices drop next year.