NFT: MSG Selling Out Less-Why?

I was stunned when looking at the box score of the Vegas-Rangers game on 10/31 to see they were about 1,000 short of a sellout.
MSG has pretty much been sold out for every Ranger game since 2011; and before then it was a blizzard in 2010 against Nashville that ended another previous streak.

I was even more surprised the Rangers game on 10/21 against Nashville, a Saturday afternoon, also was not a sell out.
My first though-what gives? Are Ranger fans this fickle that a really bad month of October is all it took to end the sell out streak? But then I thought, no, usually ticket sales are done well in advance, so if a team is coming off strong years as the Rangers have, they usually have a lag between poor play and poor attendance. Likewise, if a team has been bad for years, there also tends to be a lag before ticket sales jump.

Moreover, the Rangers and MSG have been known to be quite loyal. This extends beyond the Rangers, to the Knicks. Speaking of the Knicks, they have been a bit of a surprise this season, so I checked out their attendance. Sure enough, they have had several games with about 1,000 unsold seats, this in spite of the early season excitement.

This confirms to me, something is up with MSG. Rangers fans aren't that fickle, they are some of the most loyal in all of sports. Was there some kind of change in the price structure, that would explain why suddenly the Rangers AND Knicks are not selling out?

On TV, the stands look no emptier than before, and on Tiqiq, prices still are very high.

Is it a new marketing strategy like described below for the Knicks.

Quote:

The Knicks are showing they don’t have to sell out to win at the Garden. In an odd quirk, the Knicks have sold out fewer than half their home games this season on their way to an 11-5 home mark. Only seven of 16 Garden games have seen a full capacity of 19,812. The nine non-sellouts are only big news because the Knicks entered the season on a stirring run. Entering the season, despite all the losing, they had sold out 277 of 278 regular-season home games. The lone non-sellout in that spree came in March 2016 during a blizzard. The toll of four straight non-playoff seasons and a new regime that talked up player development — a euphemism for tanking — probably is one factor in the non-sellouts. Nevertheless, Garden officials said they also believe a new long-term marketing strategy in which more individual tickets were made available at the expense of full season-ticket plans is another cause. In the long run, the Garden is confident the new strategy will pay off, giving the public more access to tickets. In return, the franchise was willing to take the short-term risk of not selling out. Recently, the Garden limited the amount of season tickets for one purchaser to eight. The suspicion was purchasers hoarded season tickets to sell on the secondary market. According to one Garden source, the larger amount of individual tickets available caters better to the growing number of European tourists who attend Knicks games. “It’s becoming like the Yankees with all the tourists,” the Garden source said. The notion a new plethora of individual tickets now are available may not have reached the masses for Knicks fans who think season-ticket packages are the only avenue, as has been the case in past years. “Our new ticketing strategy has provided fans more options and availability to attend Knicks games throughout the season, and we’re seeing terrific individual ticket sales for every game,” Jordan Solomon, executive vice president of MSG Sports, said in a statement provided to The Post regarding the non-sellouts. “By reducing the number of full season subscriptions, we opened up more ind

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