By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
Las Vegas Aces owner Mark Davis said the red-hot WNBA team has a few marketing tricks up its sleeve to draw more fans to home games.
LVSportsBiz.com asked Davis what were those tricks and the Aces owner responded, “Magicians never give away their secrets.”
Well, the Aces might want to start rolling out those attendance marketing tricks soon. The Aces have already played 10 of their 36 games this season.
Led by high-profile coach Becky Hammon, the Aces have won nine of those 10 games and attract the likes of NFL star Tom Brady to their home games. The Aces have three of the WNBA’s top eight scorers — Jackie Young (18.5 points/game); Kelsey Plum (18.2 p/g); and A’ja Wilson (17.2 p/g) — and lead the league in scoring with nearly 92 points a game.
But in the WNBA attendance rankings, the Las Vegas Aces rank seventh in the 12-team league, according to the acrossthetimeline.com website.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Davis acknowledged about getting more fans to fill the seats at Mandalay Bay’s Michelob Ultra Arena. “These women are the greatest athletes in the world at what they do and deserve to have people come out and watch.”
We have one of the great coaches in basketball, Becky Hammon . . . It’s an exciting style of basketball that Becky has brought — Las Vegas Aces owner Mark Davis
The Aces’ middle-of-the-pack attendance numbers fly in the face of ticket prices that start at only $10. And for Tuesday’s game, won by the Aces over a competitive Connecticut Sun team, 89-81, it was two-for-one tickets. So, fans received two tickets for $10 — or five bucks a ticket.
“The pricing is very fair. We have $10 seats. Those are here so families can come and bring their kids,” said Davis, who sat courtside with Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak last night. ‘If you come out, you’ll find it’s something you want to do more than once.”
Davis, the Raiders owner, has absorbed financial losses owning the Aces after buying them from MGM Resorts International. It’s in the millions of dollars, but he didn’t want the actual loss to be made public. Davis is also building a $40 million Aces training/office center next to the Raiders HQ and training complex in Henderson. That facility should be ready in April 2023, he said.
Former MGM Resorts International CEO Jim Murren, who was responsible for bringing the team from San Antonio, Texas and rebranding the franchise into the Aces after MGM Resorts bought the team, also told LVSportsBiz.com recently that he did not understand why more male basketball fans in Las Vegas were not attending Aces games.
A common mantra in sports marketing is that winning is the best marketing.
But even with seven straight wins and the league’s best record, the Aces are filling the arena on the southern end of the Strip to about 50 percent of capacity.
PSA