The Wizards still have poor home attendance

Dec 3, 2022 - 4:00 PM

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The Washington Wizards remain among the NBA’s worst teams at filling seats for home games. The trend is nothing new. Washington has remained among the bottom 10 or even bottom five. For a point of reference, in 2016-17, the Wizards filled 17,002 seats, or 83.8 percent of their seats at the then-Verizon Center, 27th in the league. In that season, the Wizards won the Southeast Division title and advanced to the second round of the playoffs.

This season, the Wizards have 15,583 paid seats per game at Capital One Arena. That average is 27th in the NBA. 15,583 seats is also just 75.6 percent of capacity. The Wizards are last in that metric. The Indiana Pacers are second worst at percentage of seats filled at 79.7 percent, which is significantly better.

There is no one reason why the Wizards are still doing a poor job filling the arena for years. Sure, part of it is because the DMV is a professional hockey region more than a basketball one now. But this is still a big market. It just seems that the Wizards may never be able to regularly sell out the arena until either an A-list superstar plays for the team, or when the Wizards consistently have 50-win regular seasons in a five-year period.

Do you think the Wizards can ever do better with attendance at some point in the future? Let us know in the comments below.