Season-ticket revenue up 50% for Coyotes thanks to playing home games at ASU

The Arizona Coyotes have to be feeling great about their temporary home at Arizona State University.

The Coyotes are hoping to build their own arena on city-owned land in Tempe, Arizona sometime in the next few years. In the meantime, though, the Coyotes will play all their home games this season at ASU's Mullett Arena, and the move to a smaller venue has actually paid dividends in terms of season-ticket revenue.

According to a report from ESPN, the Coyotes are expected to sell out every game this season. That should be expected since Mullett Arena holds just 5,025 fans. With that said, with the sellouts comes an increase in revenue up to 50% — which is nothing to shake a stick at.

"We know this is going to be sold out for every single game and we never had any doubt that was going to be the case," Coyotes president and CEO Xavier A. Gutierrez told ESPN. "We could have sold this out to our existing season-ticket base, but we didn't think that was the right approach. We want to make sure that fans who have never experienced a game could experience it. That's a very tricky thing when you've downsized capacity."

It's tricky but it makes sense that the Coyotes are a hot ticket. The building that used to host them, now known as the Desert Diamond Arena, held just over 17,000 fans for hockey games. The average ticket price there was about $90 per game.

Mullett Arena is clearly much smaller, and while that may take away from the "roar" of the crowd, economically it's a huge win for the Coyotes. The supply of tickets is low while demand has grown due to the fact that the game will be in a much more intimate setting. That and the fact that it's right in the middle of Arizona State, which is clearly a hopping campus.

The average ticket price for a game at Mullett Arena will be $170 a pop, up 80-bucks across the board compared to the old arena. It's also high compared to the average NHL ticket, which checks in at $154 dollars.

"We're not gouging people here," Gutierrez said. "You're slightly above an NHL average now while you were well below an NHL average before. And we're in a much more centrally located area.

"We're on ASU's campus. This is great for the gameday experience and great for the cultivation of fans. You can't be on campus and not have that youthful infusion."