1. Houston is a football town. 2. After that absolute TRAIN WRECK that was last season, Les STILL raised the ticket prices yet again this year. A quick example.. two nosebleed seats against the BUCKS are $40 each before fees. Factor in $10-15 for parking, $11 beers... prices are ridiculous. In recent years I've been going to far fewer regular season games and putting that money towards playoff tickets.
Houston is a stupid football town, the team will never win anything any time soon. Yet, fans just keep slurping them despite how awful they are. I do hope they can manage to beat the Raiders 3rd string QB with a home game, but I'm not holding my breath on that. Such a garbage franchise doesn't deserve it, anyway. I wish they would just move out of the city and go infest some other ignorant fanbase. Meanwhile, the Rockets are going to be champs again. Yet, nobody seems to care in this town.
other than the obvious, les needs to lower prices and push the games at least 30min. guarantee to get a little bump in fans and attendence, then momentum will carry and more will join in.
Good people but I think they bought season tickets just to say they have it and always on their phone at the game.
The rockets won't titles in the mid 90s. Since the inception of the Texans I'm not sure the rockets have a lot of bragging to do. Yes the rockets have gone to a wcf but it isn't like we've been a title contender.
This has always bothered me about the Rockets, or rather Rockets fans. Too many corporate ticket holders who don't attend game or sell them when they're not going to attend and the lower bowl tickets are just too expensive for the typical fan.
It's pretty simple....Rockets for the most part have sucked the last 20 years and sucked bad. Houston is already not a good basketball town to begin with. Couple that with not winning anything worth a damn in the playoffs consistently and that explains the low attendance numbers. Start making a deep run in the playoffs for 3 straight years and rockets tickets will suddenly be hot commodity. So instead of blaming the people of Houston we should look at the crap product the Rockets have consistently put on the court. They only have themselves to blame.
And even if they attend, most don't really care about the games. The Rockets should find some creative way to solve this. Maybe a discount a week before the game, or some system where people can "pre-check" in and if some seat isn't going to be used, give them away to fans or sell them at a deep discount.
Houston despite being the 4th largest city is not really densely populated and that makes for long commutes and definitely has effect on attendance
Honestly, season ticket holders could barely make a profit selling their seats for playoff games. Houston fans have a limit on what they pay for games. If we play against Clippers or Cleveland, we might can sell tickets for a profit to other team fans that travel. The regular season ticket prices are too high.
This is true. I was in Chicago a little over a year ago and I got tickets in the lower level behind first base against the brewers (rivals) and all I paid was $25 and found out the face value was $17. And this was the year prior to them winning the world series so they still had a good team and are one of the most storied teams in MLB. And then you have the rockets game where you are lucky if you can sniff lower level bowl seats for under $50. Yes, I know there are a lot more baseball games than basketball games but even the same baseball tickets i mentioned for wrigley but at minute maid are $50-$60 bucks. Couple this with Houston being a city that has grown in the past 30 years from people coming from other parts of the country where they already have a team they support and that Houston sports other than the rockets in the 90s and dynamo in the mid 2000s have been very mediocre. But yes, lower prices would help but let's be real... That won't be happening.
There's a very simple solution guys. Put together a fan organization that aims to buy a large stake in the team, giving fans a say in these things. Then launch a crippling boycott, destroying the financial value of the team and drawing attention to the antiquated model of one random dude owning a team and fans having no control over their team. The bleeding in value coupled with the PR-fueled fan investment will end up working. It will take a looot of time though. Once a large stake is acquired, start tweaking things to suit players and fans more. I'm sure this will happen some time in the future. It's been tried in other sports, but hasn't been mastered yet.
Because something simple can still require decades of effort, Einstein. Also, I don't live there and don't really care about attendance. It's definitely more a problem for those who live there.
I have not looked at any data yet but it seems like we have more energy on the road to start the game because of the energy of the other team's fans. At home, we seem to always come out playing better at the 2nd half as there are more fans by then.