The Jets are the NHL’s hottest team. So why can’t they fill their arena?

“From our standpoint, the game has never been healthier,” said NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman told CNBC in November. He had entered the network’s Times Square studio to talk about the latest team valuations and the league’s future TV and streaming deals. The prospects for both are generally good. “Our competitive balance, how good the game is, is what drives ratings, attendance and growth of sponsorship partnerships – the whole package works together,” Bettman continued. This is mostly true, except when it comes to the NHL’s best team, the Winnipeg Jets.

To be clear, the Jets – rated at just over $1 billion – are excellent where it should really count: on the ice. Winnipeg has surprised the most this season with their good start. The Jets went 18-6-0 through late November and are atop the Western Conference and league standings. The 2024-25 jets are the fastest team to reach 15 wins in a season and also become the first team in NHL history to win 14 of their first 15 games. The Jets have been a solid team both on defense and in goal for many seasons. The Jets have now found their scoring touch, outscoring their opponents 94 to 63. It’s an exciting time to be a Jets fan, with seemingly few reasons not to watch every game day.

Still, the Jets have struggled to reach a sellout home crowd. With room for 15,321 for an NHL game, the Jets averaged only 13,760 fans per game mid-Novemberby one count. That’s more than their average last season (13,490), but still not where the best team in the league would expect to be. But this has been the story in Winnipeg for years. Since the NHL returned from the Covid-19 pandemic-induced hiatus, the Jets have been unable to fill seats despite playoff-bound teams being frozen. It is a clear difference from the previous nine seasons, in which the Jets each played in front of their own crowd or in front of excess capacity. What changed for Winnipeg? In a strange way: nothing.

“It’s one of the questions I’m asked most often when I talk to people across Canada about the possible return of the NHL to Winnipeg. Can we support this by selling out the building every night and generating sufficient support from the business community?” Paul Friesen wrote for the Winnipeg Sun in April 2011, shortly before the Thrashers left Atlanta for Winnipeg to become the new Jets. “In the short term, I think that’s possible,” he wrote. But “long-term support for the NHL is a different kettle of fish here. Two keys to any NHL franchise are seat and suite sales.” Friesen concluded that the corporate money would be there, but that ticket prices for regular fans would be too high.

The opposite happened. Upon their return, the Jets given priority ticket sales to fans, including those who had tickets for the Manitoba Moose, the AHL team that had moved into the Jets’ old home arena. Thousands of others joined an online ticket queue. The team sold 13,500 season tickets in three minutes. “Mark Chipman and David Thomson may have signed the $170 million check to bring the NHL back to Winnipeg, but the real owners of the team are the fans,” the Sun crowed. When the newspaper surveyed readers that spring, the majority (65.3%) said they had gotten their season tickets online in a hurry. Twenty percent were Moose season ticket holders. Only 6.6% said their employer was a corporate sponsor of Moose.

For nine years of sellout hockey, corporate money didn’t seem to matter. But over time, prices steadily rose, both for tickets and at the concessions, and the number of season tickets dwindled. The Covid-19 pandemic made everything worse as Winnipegers, like many others, were hit hard by inflation. Between the NHL’s return from the pandemic and last spring, the once 13,500-strong season ticket base had fallen to just 9,500. Jets owner Mark Chipman told The Athletic in February, months after the team’s ownership group, True North Sports and Entertainment (TNSE), began pushing business leaders in Winnipeg to promote season tickets, that those numbers were still not high enough. “I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t say, ‘We need to get back to 13,000,’” Chipman said. “This place we are in now is not going to work in the long run.” It sounded like a threat.

So far, it seems like the Jets are only headed to the playoffs. And ticket sales are apparently improving. “We are seeing growing momentum in the business community regarding season ticket memberships,” Krista Sinaisky, a spokesperson for TNSE, told the Guardian via email in November. The Jets “are not relying on just one strategy” to bring the team back to 13,000 season ticket holders, Sinaisky wrote, adding that “we are focused on selling more tickets to the business community and developing new ticket packages tailored to businesses of all sizes” – an initiative that Sinaisky said “will be launched in the coming weeks.”

It’s not over yet for the Jets – far from it. And for the record, Bettman isn’t worried. Shortly after Chipman’s comments last winter, Bettman arrived in Winnipeg to woo the corporate types. “I’m not sure why people are now speculating that somehow we won’t be here,” Bettman I wondered out loud at a press conference. “We do not operate under the sword of Damocles or on the edge,” he said. But he’s wrong. Every NHL team, like most major sports franchises, struggles with a dual identity, existing simultaneously as a soulless corporate entity fixated on profits, revenue, ebitdaand debt – those are the things that get you on CNBC – and as a much more human endeavor, embodying hope, joy, sadness and community. You could argue that the Jets, because of their dedication to their fan support, represent a more human franchise than others. But that makes the edge they ride on very real, and thinner than most.