Year 2: The ice is much firmer

Nick Christensen

Thursday, Oct. 21, 2004 | 10:22 a.m.

How do you sell a minor league hockey team in a self-proclaimed major league market?

If you're Wranglers vice president Billy Johnson, the answer is one game at a time.

Johnson, a longtime minor league baseball executive who took the reins of the expansion Wranglers last season, believes that all good things for his team come at the gate. He's about to find out.

The team will embark on its second season this weekend with games Friday at Fresno and Saturday at Long Beach before the home opener Nov. 2 against Long Beach.

And after last year's inaugural season drew an average of 4,982 fans per game to the 7,773-seat Orleans Arena, things are looking quite good for his team.

That average attendance was 700 per night better than what he expected from his first-year team, owned in majority by Fresno Falcons owner Charles Davenport with Bakersfield Condors owner Jonathan Fleisig holding a 49 percent stake.

The ownership arrangement was a must, said Johnson, because of the unique Las Vegas market.

"We have two financially strong owners who figured out Las Vegas needed more capital to have a chance to succeed," Johnson said. "Two rich guys are better than one rich guy."

Minor league sports are generally not a money-making venture. And, to nobody's surprise, the Wranglers lost money last season. But Johnson said the team was on the right track, thanks in part to a hard line they took with sponsors that wanted a free ride.

"To re-establish credibility in the market, you have to make sure you get paid for what you do," he said. "Some people were really used to getting everything for nothing, but we're not going to be unpopular for having a lot of white space on the dasher boards."

The team instead turned to more unconventional sponsors such as a bail bondsman, a doctor and a travel dot-com site for sponsorships. Now, companies are turning around, prepared to buy spots that past minor league franchises might have been more willing to give away.

Johnson said the team did not feel any impact of the proposal to move the Montreal Expos to Las Vegas, in contrast to the Las Vegas 51s, who did experience sponsors declining deals while holding out for a potentially more expensive major league franchise. But, he said, the protracted relocation of the Expos was painful for him to watch, and he expects to see the same situation continue through the near future.

"I've seen this game before. I can point to when Tampa Bay became a bargaining chip for every other team to get a better deal thanks to their dome," he said of Tropicana Field, which opened in 1990 and was the expected new home for as many as six MLB franchises before being awarded an expansion team in 1995. People have been "optimistic that Las Vegas won't be played in the same way by the rest of Major League Baseball. If there's any frustration, it's that I've seen this movie before."

He said he has talked to 51s general manager Don Logan, who told him something he believed to be unique about Las Vegas as a sports market.

In minor league sports, he said, teams aim for 80 percent renewal on season tickets. But the transient nature of Las Vegas means that 70 percent is a more realistic goal for renewals.

"That means we have to sell 500 new tickets to sustain," he said. "To be able to add a net of 300, that's very hard for us."

Logan, who also was an executive with the IHL's Las Vegas Thunder during its stint at the Thomas and Mack Center, said he thinks the ECHL's cost structure and caliber of play are its biggest benefits if the Las Vegas team is to translate into a business success.

"There were a lot of things that made the IHL ultimately fold, that every minor league sports team took note of and tried to improve on," Logan said. "We (the IHL) had the advantage of the level of play. You could play off that a lot better. Cujo (Curtis Joseph), we had Radek Bonk as a prospect, Petr Nedved, Alexei Yashin, guys that spent time with us when they were holding out from the NHL.

"Somebody like me from Tonopah, Nevada, I couldn't tell the difference. To an average hockey fan in Vegas, I don't know that they get the level of play so I don't think that's as big of an issue."

Johnson said he thinks that at this point, Double-A hockey is as good a level of hockey as the market can suport.

"There's no compelling reason for a higher level," he said. "From a financial aspect, you point to the Thunder. Anybody is more viable as a smaller fish than to have to be starting as a big fish."

The small fish, though, still hasn't been spotted by many Las Vegans, Johnson believes. He said he has told his sales staff to continue to approach ticket sales as though this is the team's first year. Rather than lobby television stations or newspaper columnists to come out, he said, the team focuses on bringing in more fans under the assumption that larger crowds will merit the increased media coverage on its own. And rather than focusing on selling out games, he'd rather see the crowd at just under capacity so nobody's turned away.

"We want to reach that critical mass," Johnson said, referring to the atmosphere created by a large crowd. "If we're selling 1,400 group tickets, that gets us to 5,800 on a regular Friday or Saturday night."