Although the same sport, the popularity and scrutiny of hockey here and in Toronto are quite disparate. I’d almost equate the loyalty (or lunacy) of Leafs Nation with Raider Nation or 49er Fanaticism. If I were a member of those, I’d be paying at least twice what I’m paying for Sharks tickets to sit in a stadium with 3x the seats. Anyway you slice it, and whatever sport is doing the cutting, $100 a ticket is a hell of a lot of money.

We have to pay a lot more than $54 a seat to sit in the 100 level (well over twice that much in fact). Actually to be entirely honest, the only time I’ve ever sat in the 100 level to see a hockey game at the Air Canada Centre was to watch a St John’s Maple Leafs Calder Cup playoff game against the Provedince Bruins like 5 years ago.

You also actually get to watch a decent team night in and night out. We on the other hand get to watch the skating train-wreck that is the Toronto Maple Leafs.

I understand that rising ticket prices might bother you a bit, but you have a long way to go before you’re in the upper tier of prices. In fact, San Jose is well below the NHL average for ticket prices. So “bend over” is a bit extreme… more like “pony up for the fact that we’ve produced a contender for the past 5 years straight.”

As to your second point, It is a bit of chicken-and-egg discussion, to be sure. But it’s not as tied to salaries as you think. If you look at the top 10 team valuations reported by Forbes, the percentage of gate receipts to overall revenues is at or less than fifty percent. Corporate money is at least as responsible for growing league revenues. Which is why teams like Nashville are in so much trouble- the TV revenue slice is tiny, and they need big corporate sponsors to have positive cash flow.

I’d say the raising of prices is partially due to what the market will bear, and partially to keep up with the Joneses. Thank God we got cost certainty, huh?

This doesn’t quite seem like a chicken-and-egg discussion, but if you’ve got to overpay players to come to your team, then you raise ticket prices, then the league sees more revenue (cap goes up), then players get more, so you’ve got to “overpay”. Or does it start with the league seeing more revenue?