What's really going on with Little Caesars Arena's empty seats

On an evening in late February, Zack Sutton was watching a Detroit Pistons game with a few buddies as they sat on thickly bolstered leather sofas inside a new downtown restaurant.

It was a Friday night and the place was humming with people and music. Sutton, 24, and his pals melted into the swanky furniture. They chatted and swigged craft beers.

The Pistons were in the third quarter of a failed comeback against the Boston Celtics on Feb. 23, in one of their few sellouts at Little Caesars Arena — an inaugural season filled with overall attendance success for both the Pistons and Red Wings but not without its frustrations for fans.

Sutton kept an eye on the game with regular glances at the televisions near the bar. Pink Floyd’s “Money” was blaring through the restaurant’s thumping sound system:

Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash

New car, caviar, four-star daydream

Think I'll buy me a football team

Kyrie Irving was working his magic on his way to 18 points as the Pistons were trying to claw back. Sutton kept watching. More beer, more music, more lounging.

Here’s the strange thing: Sutton had tickets to the game. So did his friends. But they chose to lounge in Kid Rock’s Made in Detroit restaurant located on the Little Caesars Arena concourse, rather than find their seats in the upper bowl.

By the looks of the bustling activity throughout the concourse, Sutton and his friends were not alone in their preference.

“There’s individual (craft) beers here and the Kid Rock environment,” said Sutton, who lives in Muskegon, about three hours from Detroit. “We’re Kid Rock fans, so we wanted to sit here in the environment and just chill for a little bit and let it soak in.”

The Pistons, and Red Wings, have been scrutinized for empty seats that have been noticeable on television broadcasts. But even if fans aren't always in their seats watching the game, Little Caesars Arena is helping its two main tenants hold steady or improve their respective rankings in league attendance while proving to be a fun and expansive new home. For some. For others — longtime fans who preferred Joe Louis or the Palace — there is more bad than good.

For Sutton and his friends, craft beer and leather sofas marinated a lot better than arena seats and flagging down beer vendors in the aisles.

“Oh, hell yeah,” one of Sutton’s friends said.

“We haven’t had a Bud Light tonight,” Sutton said, “I can tell you that.”

“We want to drink beer, we don’t want to pay for water,” another friend chimed in as he drank an M-43 from Old Nation Brewing Co. in Williamston.

“And I’m a big Bud Light fan, definitely,” Sutton confessed. “But you come to a big event and you want to hang out and have fun, you stick with something stronger and you can just hang out and chill and be mellow.”

Selling seats ... and seat covers

The Red Wings and Pistons have records below .500 and they are both either entirely out of the playoff race or on the outside looking in. But if you go by attendance figures, the Wings and Pistons are having great seasons.

The Pistons have sold out six games this season, compared with just two sellouts in their final season at the Palace. They have drawn 603,128 fans and are averaging 17,232 — 20,491 is a sellout. They are on track to draw 706,521 fans over 41 regular-season games, which would be the most since they drew 768,826 in 2009-10.

The Wings expect to sell out their 41 regular-season games, with 19,515 marking a sellout.

There's optimism the success will continue.

Both teams expect little change in ticket prices for next season. The Wings said the vast majority of ticket prices will stay the same or decrease, though they did not provide details on pricing or season-ticket renewals.

The Pistons said ticket prices will be predominantly static with fluctuations in certain areas and a 0.01 percent average increase. They began renewing season-tickets this month but said it's too early to compare numbers to last year. They are "encouraged by the response."

Selling tickets is one thing. But making sure fans are putting their derrieres in the seats they buy is another.

As much as anything this season, Little Caesars Arena has gotten a lot of attention for its empty seats that are on display nightly as both the Wings and Pistons struggle through poor seasons. The prime club seats in the middle of the lower bowl are especially noticeable to TV audiences. They are more expansive and more expensive.

The Pistons announced a sponsorship deal with Art Van Furniture last month to put logoed black covers over the red seats.

Longtime Pistons season ticket holders Tom and Cathy Pease of Clinton Township said the reason for the covers was obvious.

“The covers are there to hide the red,” Tom Pease said. “(The color of the seats) allowed the TV to see so many red seats.”

The Pistons would not address whether the seat covers are an attempt to disguise empty seats.

The Peases were among the 80% renewal rate among season ticket holders who followed the team from the Palace. They are splitting season tickets in the Rehmann Club five rows behind the visitors’ bench, but their experience this season has not reflected the feeling of a nearly full arena.

“Someone mentioned the other night that even when the big people come to town, like Cleveland, there ain’t nobody there,” said Cathy Pease, 70.

Indeed, when the Cavaliers and LeBron James last visited Little Caesars Arena on Jan. 30, the announced attendance was 18,508.

“I think it’s a lot harder to get into the excitement now,” said Tom Pease, 69. “I used to bring a megaphone and I used to shout out all kinds of stuff like, ‘We want another one, just like the other one’ when the other team would miss (a free throw). I used to cheer, ‘Rah-rah-ree, kick ’em in the knee!’ I don’t even feel comfortable shouting out anymore.”

The Pistons would not respond to questions about the arena feeling empty. Instead, they pointed to their attendance data that showed increases in several areas, including group tickets and an average attendance that has jumped by more than 1,200 fans.

Admittedly, the Peases said they don’t have a strong sense of how many fans are on the concourse. They eat dinner at the Rehmann Club before the game and return for more food at halftime.

But the couple was adamant about not renewing their club seats or season tickets because of their displeasure with the size and quality of the club’s food. They also weren’t happy about sharing the LCA Parking Garage attached to the arena with non-season ticket holders and having to wait with everyone else to enter the arena at the same time. At the Palace, they could enter the arena 30 minutes before the general public.

“I’m 70 years old,” Tom Pease said. “It’s kind of hard to win a foot race.”

“I think it’s not right a season ticket (holder) put all their money in this,” Cathy Pease said, “and anybody that just buys a ticket comes in the same time as you do.”

According to the Pistons, the LCA Parking Garage is not open to the general public when suite, floor and club seats are sold out. The team estimates less than 15% of the garage’s space is sold to the general public on a nightly basis.

It’s not the Joe

If there’s one thing Wings fans agree on, it’s that Little Caesars Arena is not Joe Louis Arena. For the good and the bad.

“I really miss Joe Louis,” said Sheri Marcus, 49, of Birmingham, a longtime season ticket holder. “I just feel like it was a more personal experience, I guess.

“But the new place is totally state of the art. It’s great. It’s just a little less personal.”

Marcus’ late father, Hank, had season tickets for decades. There’s such reverence for the Wings in Marcus’ family that her 8-year-old daughter, Emy Beckett, thinks the Joe should be converted into a hockey museum.

A study commissioned by the City of Detroit envisions another plan — a major remake of the area with changes that could include a continuous riverwalk as part of a "holistic development framework." The city has a deadline of May 1 to start demolition of the arena.

A lot of the love for Joe Louis Arena sprouted from the Wings’ excellence that brought the team and its fans four Stanley Cups in 12 years. But it also came from the ushers and the employees Marcus befriended at Joe Louis.

“They’re still there, but they’re just in different positions,” she said. “I don’t know. I guess maybe it takes a few years to get to know all the people around you and to develop the camaraderie.

“But I just don’t feel that there. Even going in and out of the portals, they have to check your ticket each and every time no matter if they recognize you or not. They don’t even try to recognize you. You’re just some other random person there.”

Marcus asked her 12-year-old son, Max Beckett, which arena he preferred.

“And he says Little Caesars,” Marcus said. “And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s cooler.’ Generally, I’d say that’s about right.”

It’s almost impossible to argue Little Caesars Arena isn’t cooler than the Joe or just about any other arena you can think of. The Wings have an impressive 3D video introduction on the ice and there are several fun, clever and interactive attractions throughout the concourse. One of the best is the Coca-Cola fan experience that projects fans walking around the concourse onto a large video screen with superimposed Wings or Pistons players. It has mostly strong sight lines with a design so steep it can be nauseating when looking down from the upper bowl.

There’s also a nice blend of nostalgia with the old Olympia sign mounted on a brick wall and all kinds of mementos, right down to Dave DeBusschere’s Chuck Taylor high-tops.

They even reintroduced organ music, which is prominently featured throughout the game. The Wings conducted a survey that told them fans missed the Olympia organ.

“It was shiny, bright,” said Patrick Flynn, 26, who grew up in Grosse Pointe as a longtime season ticket holder. “The whole scheme with the old ‘Olympia’ scrolling up the wall with the murals and the brick. Even that stuff is newer than anything you saw at the Joe. I think that was my first impression.

“It feels when you’re in there, when you’re outside looking at the building, it feels like you’re in a whole new city. It’s got its own kind of atmosphere about it.”

Flynn is a hockey purist who prioritizes watching the game. But he was impressed with the food variety at the District Market, a collection of six restaurants modeled after "Le District" in New York's financial district, and admitted the gleaming concourse is a place where he could hang out “two hours before a game and stay two hours after a game.”

“In talking to buddies who have been there even more than I have, they didn’t leave any box unchecked, it seems,” he said. “They have anything a fan could want. And they make it a lot easier, I thought, to get back to your seat for the action: more bathrooms, better flow, a lot more room to get around.”

‘We’re not a bunch of cattle’

Paul Witt and Lindsay Teeple, both of Southgate, munched on hot dogs and drank beer on a high-top table near the Goose Island Pub and Dearborn Sausage Haus during the second period of the Wings’ game against the Buffalo Sabres on Feb. 22.

Witt, 43, has been a Wings season ticket holder for years in the upper bowl. He misses the Joe because he grew up going to the stadium. But he doesn’t miss the cramped quarters of the Joe’s concourse. “We’re not a bunch of cattle.”

A new and common behavior at Little Caesars Arena is the way people stand around on the concourse. Because of its expansive corridors, people tend to congregate in little huddles everywhere, especially near places to get food and drink — similar to the way people hang out in kitchens at parties — and they like to stand.

As Witt and Teeple ate their food, there were plenty of other people around them doing the same, standing around and eating and drinking at other high-top tables. There is no shortage of high-top tables on the concourse. Outside the District Market, black oil drums serve as tables.

“We can always find a TV somewhere,” said Teeple, 37. “It wasn’t that easy at the Joe. There’s more places to stand and eat, too. At the Joe, we usually always used a trash can, which is gross, but we did it.”

Witt and Teeple’s experience in their upper-bowl seats is a bit different. There, they feel cramped.

“The seats are tiny,” Teeple said. “If there’s people beside you, you’re like this (squished).”

“The cup holders are a plus, but it is tight,” Witt said. “Again, the good thing also is you can eat out here; there’s TVs everywhere.”

In the lower bowl, Marcus said the seats were roomier than they were at the Joe.

“Joe Louis Arena seat width varied significantly,” according to an e-mail from the Wings. “Some of the Little Caesars Arena seats are wider and a handful are narrower as a function of an arena with some of the best sightlines in sports and entertainment.”

The Wings would get an argument from Teeple, who complained about too much light and noise in her seats in section 212 of the upper bowl.

“I really liked the Joe a lot and I feel like there wasn’t a bad seat,” she said. “And here, there are bad seats.”

Club seating and quieter crowds

Marcus’ family used to have some of the best seats at the Joe. They were in the last row of section 108, between the red line and the blue line. At Little Caesars Arena, those seats were converted to the more expensive club seats, which her family either couldn’t get or wasn’t willing to pay for. Marcus’ family settled for seats in section 112, two sections over from the club seats, but it has a view obstructed by safety glass near an entrance portal.

When Witt looks down from section 212 at the club seats directly beneath, he sees a lot of empty chairs and he hears fewer chants.

“So maybe that’s why a lot of those seats are empty, because they’re corporate,” he said. “They had the seats, they bought the seats, they’re counted as seats (sold), but they don’t entertain their people all the time.

“And normal people like me, you’re priced out of it. Either you’re priced out of it, or if you can afford it, they’re not available because they’re sold out.”

The Wings said in an e-mail they did as much as they could to accommodate fans’ seating choices and explained the appearance of empty seats by noting every home game has been sold out and that "fans are enjoying everything the arena has to offer, including the premium spaces."

“We made exhaustive efforts to ensure ticketholders were satisfied with the options available,” the team said in an e-mail. “Olympia Entertainment invited every full season ticket holder for a personal tour at our preview center and to provide feedback on their preferred seats. We also developed a personalized website that provided detailed information on everything season ticket holders needed to complete their seat relocation.”

What Flynn noticed at games he attended this season was a crowd that was far less boisterous than the ones at Joe Louis, where the chants were raucous and regular. Flynn said chants at the Joe tended to emanate from season ticket holders in the upper bowl, and he guessed some of those fans might not have migrated to the new arena.

“I know they’ve had issues with people spending two, 2½ periods on the concourse, which is easy to do,” he said. “But it seems like the fans have been a little disengaged for the most part, I’d say.”

Another factor is the configuration of Little Caesars Arena, where the lower bowl and the upper bowl are separated by mezzanine seating and suites. At Joe Louis, there was no separation between the two bowls because suites were skyboxes at the top of the arena.

“It isn’t as loud, that’s true,” Teeple said. “Where we’re at, you kind of feel separated from the people in the lower bowl.”

Parking issues

If there’s a universal challenge, if not an outright frustration for fans, it’s the price and scarcity of parking near Little Caesars Arena.

Olympia Development operates 32 parking facilities it says are within a 10-minute walk of the arena. It partners with ParkWhiz, an e-parking service that allows fans to book a guaranteed spot ahead of time.

The day of the Wings-Golden Knights game on March 8, the only Olympia Development lots open were at the Fox Garage on Montcalm and the D Garage on Fisher Service Drive. Both lots were charging $30 and were two-tenths of a mile away with snow and temperatures in the 20s in the forecast.

For the Pistons-Chicago Bulls game March 9, parking ranged from $30 to $40.

According to the Wings, every lot and garage Olympia Development operates is open for Wings and Pistons games and concerts with nearly 8,000 parking spots available for as low as $5, depending on the event and proximity to the arena. The Wings encourage fans to reserve parking early through ParkWhiz.com.

There are other parking areas and lots not affiliated with Olympia Development, which the Wings acknowledge and said afford "far more parking options compared to Joe Louis Arena." But as more people discover these options, they’re filling up as well.

“Parking was great,” Teeple said, “until everyone found all of our secret parking spots.”

Then there’s the challenge of leaving the game. Marcus said it sometimes takes her 45 minutes to get on the freeways with all the game traffic and street closures.

“We’ve worked extensively with public partners, traffic engineering firms and others to optimize egress in this more dynamic downtown environment, and we continue to work to enhance this experience,” the Wings said in an e-mail.

This is going to be home

Once upon a time, the Pistons drew 1 million fans to watch Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman play the 1987-88 season at the Pontiac Silverdome. That season, they averaged 26,012 fans and led the NBA in attendance for a fifth straight year.

They also barely cracked the six-figure mark in 1963-64, when they averaged 3,346 fans in 30 games at Cobo Arena.

Then the Pistons stopped being renters and finally bought a place of their own: The Palace. In 1988-89, they moved in and decorated the joint right away with a championship banner. It felt like home from the start.

“I think I liked it right away because I knew it was them, where obviously they were a tenant at Cobo, and I did go to games at Cobo,” said Brian Minbiole, 54, of Rochester. “I warmed up to the Palace right away because not only was the team good but I think Mr. (Bill) Davidson was doing all he could to ensure that the Pistons had a chance to win: the team plane, the new arena, everything there was set up to make them feel like it was theirs."

And after all those years of the Pistons being squatters in somebody else’s building, this one was truly theirs.

Minbiole estimated he attended about 500 events at the Palace and said he didn’t understand the need for the Pistons to leave. He said the Pistons don’t exactly feel like squatters again, but Little Caesars Arena is far from feeling like home, in part because of the arena's predominantly red seats and the way each team waits until the start of the game to unfurl its own banners and retired numbers.

“It just seems,” Minbiole said, “like the building was developed clearly initially for hockey: the height of some of the seats and the proximity that you get to the floor. …

“And I certainly don’t feel like LCA is anything like Cobo or the Silverdome, where they were kind of an afterthought tossed in there. I think overall the building has got some really marvelous attractions. And as a born-in-Detroit guy, I’m very proud of it. And then maybe part of it is the product has been underwhelming so far.”

The Pistons said they continue to try to improve the fan experience at Little Caesars Arena.

"We work closely with our partners at Olympia Entertainment to document our history, tradition and current brand initiatives throughout all aspects of the arena," the team said in an e-mail. "It’s an ongoing process and we continuously look for new opportunities to engage fans and enhance the arena experience."

Little Caesars Arena has been short-listed as a finalist for Venue of the Year through the Stadium Business Awards and Sports Technology Awards. Part of that, besides the Pistons and Wings' efforts, is because of LCA's concert success. The arena's early weeks were loaded up with high-profile acts, including Paul McCartney, Ed Sheeran, Jay-Z, the Eagles and Katy Perry, and most shows were sellouts, with a capacity of about 15,000.

Industry accolades are nice, but people like Minbiole and Flynn want to see something else at their shiny new arena.

“They haven’t dropped an octopus from the ceiling yet,” he said. “We haven’t had the playoffs. … It may take getting back to the playoffs to start to feel like this is home. Because if you don’t watch playoff hockey, or at least good hockey, in a building like that, it’s not going to feel like home.”

That, ultimately, could be the key to what endears Little Caesars Arena to Pistons and Wings fans: Shared memories of meaningful games.

“There’s nothing that this place doesn’t already have,” Flynn said. “They don’t have a winning hockey team right now, and they’ve got a struggling basketball team.

“But I think that winning kind of heals everything eventually and I think the more and more people go to this building they’ll realize, whether we like or not, this is going to be home and it’s a pretty awesome home to have.”

Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.