NHL Attendance Analysis

Now that the NHL regular season is over, let's take a look at NHL team attendance and see what effect (if any) the NHL lockout had on fan attendance as compared to the past few years.

I grabbed the NHL attendance data from ESPN from the 2000/2001 season to the current 2012/2013 NHL regular season, sorted the data and then ran a t-test (much like I did after the recent NBA lockout).  Here is the average home attendance from 2005-2006 to 2012 (or actually 2013) NHL regular seasons.  The pink line is the most recent NHL regular season and notice that even thought there were 17 fewer home games the average attendance for the teams is very similar to the average home regular season attendance in the previous non-lockout regular seasons.  In other words, there is not much change in attendance from 2011-2012 to this season.

 

Using more formal statistical analysis, I calculated the t-test for the last two NHL regular seasons and found that there is no statistical difference between the home regular season attendance in the 2011-2012 and 2013 seasons.  For those curious, the t-test was  0.318 using a two sample equal (and unequal) variance measure.