Evaluating the Philadelphia 76ers Low Attendance Numbers

The Philadelphia 76ers attendance has certainly been low, but it may not be as bad as it’s been made to seem, especially by team owners.

The Philadelphia 76ers posses the league’s worst record, so it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots and conclude that it would be pretty hard to regularly sell out the Wells Fargo Center. When your team isn’t playing well, people aren’t as incentivized to come and watch.

The amount of fans remaining at the end of the game is bad, too. If we tallied up the amount of fans remaining by the fourth quarter, the Sixers would probably look even worse compared to the rest of the league, but that’s another story.

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The Sixers have had an annual season attendance of just over 260,000, which is good enough to have them at 28th in the league. Certainly not good, by any means, but their average of just about 15,000 per home game is on pace to make their attendance a bit better than last season’s was.

A lot of that can probably be attributed to rookie center Jahlil Okafor who has drawn fans in who want to see the young talent play in his rookie season. He’s entertaining to watch, and typically plays a good game. That, paired with the usual faces of Nerlens Noel and Joel Embiid pre-game are the reasons fans come in.

The Sixers were last in attendance for a while, but the recent return of point guard Ish Smith has helped push them to 28 in home attendance. Also, the two biggest games that I can remember as being sure-sell outs, or at least close to it were the Los Angeles Lakers home game, and Smith’s first game back against the Timberwolves. These games have been the only home games won by the Sixers this year. Sell-outs statistically seem to help the Sixers, but I think that if we find that the Sixers sell out the game against the Golden State Warriors at the end of this month, they probably still won’t win. It’s not all about having a big crowd, but I’m sure it helps.

The Sixers were also brought down for their road attendance numbers this season, but I don’t think that’s fair.

Earlier this season, it was reported that owners around the league were complaining about the Sixers and how they were hurting ticket sales, urging NBA commissioner Adam Silver to make the Sixers do something. This led to the hire of Jerry Colangelo to the front office, a move that was urged by Silver. Despite that, the numbers don’t exactly back up the owners’ claims that the Sixers hurt their ticket sales.

ESPN publishes attendance statistics for teams, even as visitors. According to their publishing, the Sixers bring in about 17,000 fans for every time they are the visitors, which is fairly low (that leaves around 3,000 seats to be empty for the average NBA arena). The owners claiming that the Sixers were selling less tickets wasn’t wrong, the Sixers definitely don’t sell out arenas like the Oklahoma City Thunder, but they certainly aren’t the worst team in the league like the owners implied. In fact, they’re far from it.

The Sixers are the 16th team in descending order when we look at average tickets sold per road game, which puts 13 teams behind them, 13 teams that should have been brought up before the Sixers when the owners were complaining about poor ticket sales.

Teams like the Sacramento Kings and Portland Trailblazers certainly could have been complained about.

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Since this list published by ESPN is active, we can’t go back and see what the numbers looked like when the complaints were put in for Silver to do something with the team, but I’m sure they weren’t too different from the way they look today.

The Sixers still can’t fill the seats, but things are looking up for them, especially now that Ish Smith is back. Oh, and to the league owners, maybe you should fact-check, and call out the 13 other teams that are selling tickets worse than the Sixers are before you complain to the commissioner about ticket sales.