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November 18, 2009
NYTimes Sports section salutes Yormark, calls promotion a "modest success" (*) despite failure to come close to 15,000 attendance
Atlantic Yards Report
New York Times sports reporter Ken Belson November 16:
Whether the Nets beat Indiana (4-3) is an open question. But the promotion has prompted some fans to act. The team has sold 700 $10 seats so far and expects as many as 15,000 fans to show up for Tuesday’s game, around the season average.
Belson, writing today (in an article destined for tomorrow's paper), curiously called the promotion a "modest success" despite the failure to come close to 15,000 and offers some sympathetic rhetoric ("Alas"):
The team sold 1,000 $10 tickets and gave away 500 seats to season-ticket holders,
a modest successon 48 hours’ notice and on a Tuesday night against a lesser rival. Alas, the promotion did not get the Nets over the hump. The announced crowd of 11,332 was more than 3,000 under the season average and the Nets lost, 91-83.Still, the promotion was vintage Yormark: creative, quick and value oriented. It was also a sign of how far he and the Nets are going to fill their arena and of the challenges they face.
*Update: after I first posted, that "modest success" line was edited away.
NoLandGrab: Norman Oder goes on to point out that the promotion was a modest personal success for Yormark, who managed to scam several members of the press into giving him ink.
Honestly, is the guy not seriously overrated? He's CEO of a team that's now 0-12. Offering tickets to a(n allegedly) professional sporting event for $10, or, better yet, free, he only managed to fill 1,500 additional seats (maybe, given the NBA's loosey-goosey rules on what constitutes "attendance" (and c'mon, in this age of email and Facebook and Twitter and print-yourself tickets, 48 hours is an eternity). The team is going to break all previous records for losing money this season. Where's the beef?
Posted by eric at November 18, 2009 11:11 PM