Pittsburgh Penguins lower season ticket prices

Pittsburgh Penguins lower season ticket prices
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By JOE MANDAK
Associated Press Writer
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- The financially struggling Pittsburgh Penguins are dropping season ticket prices 3.5 percent to 28.6 percent after finishing out of the NHL playoffs in consecutive seasons.
The goal was to give fans more $30-and-under choices, the team said. Under the new pricing plan, 6,900 seats in the 16,958-seat Mellon Arena are $30 or less for season ticket holders.
The biggest price drops come in the D-level and F-balcony seats at Mellon Arena. Full-season ticket holders will pay $30 per game, down from $39, for seats in the D level, and $20 for F balcony seats, down from $28. The F balcony price cut is the same for 20-game season ticket holders, while D-level tickets will drop from $42 to $35 per game under that plan.
Seats in A/B levels were cut by $2.50 each under both plans, and those in C level by $2 each. E-level balcony seats are being cut $1 each under both plans.
Ticket prices for individual games and 10-game packages will be announced in the summer.
"We think we're heading in the right direction, both on and off the ice," team owner Mario Lemieux said.
General Manager Craig Patrick has called that direction "survival mode" in recent weeks.
The Penguins have traded or not re-signed high priced stars including Jaromir Jagr, Alexei Kovalev, Robert Lang and Darius Kasparaitis in the past two seasons. Not coincidentally, the Penguins have finished with their two worst regular-season records since Lemieux's rookie year in 1984-85.
The Penguins entered last season with the equivalent of about 8,000 full-season ticket holders, about 1,600 less than 2001-02, said team spokesman Tom McMillan.
The Penguins' finished next-to-last in last season's NHL overall standings, winning just two of their last 21 games. The team averaged just 14,749 fans a game, down 6 percent from 15,649 per game in 2001-2002.
The Penguins still have hopes for a new $270 million arena by 2007 to replace Mellon which, at 42 years old, is the oldest in the league. But public financing for that project has been slow to come together.
Until then, the Penguins -- along with other struggling NHL teams -- are pinning their hopes on a salary cap or similar spending controls when the league negotiates a new bargaining agreement with the players' union after next season.
That means Penguins fans can expect to see a team stocked with cheaper talent and young prospects and, most likely, no Lemieux, who has all but said he is retiring.