“From our standpoint, the game has never been healthier,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told CNBC in November. He had stopped into the network’s Times Square studio to talk about the latest team valuations and the league’s future TV and streaming deals. The outlook for both is broadly good. “Our competitive balance, how good the game is, is what’s fuelling ratings, attendance, partnership growth in terms of sponsorships – the whole package is working together,” Bettman continued. All of which is mostly true, except for when it comes to the NHL’s best team, the Winnipeg Jets.

To be clear, the Jets – valued at just over $1bn – are excellent where it should really count: on the ice. Winnipeg have surprised most with their hot start this season. The Jets went 18-6-0 through the end of November and sit atop the Western Conference and the league. The 2024-25 Jets are the fastest team to reach 15 wins in a season and also the first team in NHL history to win 14 of their first 15 games. A solid team for many seasons on defence and in goal, the Jets have now found their scoring touch, outscoring opponents 94 to 63. It’s an exciting time to be a Jets fan, with seemingly few reasons not to watch each game day.

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Yet, the Jets are struggling to get sell-out home crowds. With room for 15,321 for an NHL game, the Jets were only averaging around 13,760 fans per game in mid-November, according to one tally. That’s up from their average last season – 13,490 – but still short of where the best team in the league might expect to be. But this has been the story in Winnipeg for years. Ever since the NHL returned from the Covid-19 pandemic-imposed break, the Jets can’t fill seats, despite icing playoff-bound teams. It’s been a marked departure from the prior nine seasons, each of which the Jets played to capacity or over-capacity home crowds. What changed for Winnipeg? In a weird way, nothing.

“It’s one of the questions I get asked most often when talking to people across Canada about the possible return of the NHL to Winnipeg. Could we support it by selling out the building every night and generating enough corporate support?” Paul Friesen wrote for the Winnipeg Sun in April 2011, shortly before the Thrashers left Atlanta for Winnipeg to become the new Jets. “Short-term, yeah, I believe we could,” he wrote. But “long-term support for the NHL here is another kettle of fish. Two keys to any NHL franchise are the sale of seats and suites.” Friesen concluded that the corporate money would be there, but that ticket prices for regular fans would be too high.

The opposite occurred. Upon their return, the Jets prioritized ticket sales to fans, including those who’d held tickets for the Manitoba Moose, the AHL team that had moved into the Jets’ old home arena. Thousands more joined an online ticket queue. The team sold 13,500 season tickets in three minutes. “Mark Chipman and David Thomson may have signed the $170m cheque to bring the NHL back to Winnipeg, but the team’s real owners are its fans,” the Sun crowed. Indeed, when the paper polled readers that spring, the majority (65.3%) said they’d got their season tickets in the online rush. Twenty percent had been Moose season ticket holders. Just 6.6% said their employer had been a Moose corporate sponsor.

For nine years of sell-out hockey, the corporate money didn’t seem to matter. But, over time prices steadily rose, for tickets and at the concessions, and the season ticket base dwindled. The Covid-19 pandemic made everything worse, as Winnipegers, like many others, were hit hard by inflation. Between the return of the NHL after the pandemic and last spring, the once 13,500-strong season-ticket base was down to just 9,500. Jets owner Mark Chipman told The Athletic in February, months after the team’s ownership group, True North Sports and Entertainment (TNSE), had begun pushing business leaders in Winnipeg to promote season tickets, that those numbers were still not high enough. “I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t say, ‘We’ve got to get back to 13,000,’” Chipman said. “This place we find ourselves in right now, it’s not going to work over the long haul.” It sounded like a threat.

So far, the only place the Jets look like they’re headed is to the playoffs. And the ticket sales are, apparently, improving. “We are seeing growing momentum in the business community with respect to season ticket memberships,” Krista Sinaisky, a TNSE spokesperson, told the Guardian via email in November. The Jets “are not relying on just any one strategy” to get the team back to 13,000 season ticket holders, Sinaisky wrote, adding that “we are focused on selling more tickets to the business community and are developing new ticket packages tailored to companies of all sizes” – an initiative Sinaisky said that “will be launched in the coming weeks.”

It’s not over for the Jets – far from it. And, for the record, Bettman isn’t worried. Shortly after Chipman’s comments last winter, Bettman arrived in Winnipeg to woo the corporate types. “I’m not sure why people are now speculating that somehow we’re not going to be here,” Bettman wondered aloud in a news conference. “We’re not operating under the sword of Damocles or on a razor’s edge,” he said. But he’s wrong, there. Every NHL team, like most major sports franchises, struggles with a dual identity, existing simultaneously as both a soulless corporate entity fixated on profits, revenue, ebitda, and debt – that is, the things that get you on CNBC – and as a much more human enterprise, embodying hope, joy, sadness, and community. You could argue the Jets, by virtue of their dedication to their fan support, represent a more human franchise than others. But because of that, the edge they ride is very real, and thinner than most.