ATLANTA (Bloomberg) – It’s playoff time in Atlanta, and that means there are plenty of tickets available.
Last Sunday, the Hawks couldn’t sell out the deciding Game 5 of its first-round playoff series with the Pistons in an arena that seats 9,300. Tickets were so plentiful for the first game of the Hawks’ second-round series against the Knicks Tuesday night, that the team’s owner, Turner Broadcasting Systems Inc., was literally giving them away.
It’s not just basketball, either. Entire sections were empty for Falcons playoff games last season, and there were 8,000 empty seats at Turner Field for the Braves’ first game of the National League Championship Series last fall.
Atlanta, which calls itself the city too busy to hate, may just be too busy to go see sports. That could mean trouble for Turner and its parent Time Warner Inc., whose National Hockey League team, the Atlanta Thrashers, debuts in October. Turner also owns the Braves.
“It’s the South, and people are very laid back down here,” said Hawks center Dikembe Mutombo. “Maybe the fans are just spoiled because their teams always win.”
Spoiled? Even though the Braves have played in four World Series this decade, and the Falcons made it to their first Super Bowl in January, Atlanta can boast of just one major professional championship in its history – the 1995 Braves.
“The fans here are so pitiful,” said Roger Ross, a diehard Hawks fan from Kennesaw, Georgia. “How are they going to sell out hockey when the only thing we know about ice is to put it in our drinks?”
For Sunday’s deciding first-round game against Detroit, the Hawks drew 8,460 at Alexander Memorial Coliseum, Georgia Tech’s basketball arena, leaving almost a thousand seats empty. That was after Turner officials sent an e-mail to the company’s Atlanta employees offering each two complimentary tickets.
Announced attendance of 18,513 at Tuesday’s game against the Knicks was better but still 15 percent below the arena’s capacity for basketball games, and many of the fans were in New York jerseys. The same was true last night when Game 2 drew 22,558.
“There were some good fans out there,” Knicks forward Kurt Thomas said Tuesday. “Luckily they seemed to be rooting for us.”
