I’ve written about attendance in the NLL a number of times over the years but one aspect that I have looked into but never written about is what I call “draw”. This has nothing to do with face-offs, we’re talking about how different teams affect attendance at the opposing arenas.

Obviously there are season ticket holders and fans of their local team who go to every home game regardless of who the opponent is. But there are others who may only want to attend a few games a year – but how do you decide which games to attend? Assuming the dates themselves are not the problem, many people will look at the opponent. Some pick a strong team, so they bought tickets for when Buffalo or Toronto come to town (though those picking Toronto got fooled this year). Others will pick a team with a superstar player, so they’ll buy Georgia or Ottawa tickets specifically to see Lyle Thompson or Jeff Teat. Still others know or are related to an NLL player, so they get tickets for a particular team so they can see their brother / cousin / son / best friend play. I’m sure there are lots of different reasons. Maybe someone likes the Mammoth jerseys so they go when Colorado comes to town.

I wanted to see if I could figure out which teams are the most popular in opposing arenas. To do this for a particular team, I did this for each of that team’s away games:

1. Calculate the average home attendance for that game’s opponent in the same season, then
2. Calculate the difference between that game’s attendance and the average home attendance in that arena. I call this value the “draw”.

For example, Buffalo’s first away game this season was in Rochester. Rochester’s average attendance this season (so far) is 5,234. Attendance at that Buffalo @ Rochester game was 6,454, so the “draw” here was 1,220. If the attendance at a game is less than the average, the draw would be negative.

Then to calculate the season numbers, we calculate the average of those differences. At this point in the 2025 season, the top five teams in draw are:

• Buffalo, 1393
• Albany, 430
• Toronto, 202
• Rochester, 111
• Colorado, 32

All the other teams are negative, with Ottawa (–362) and Las Vegas (–569) at the bottom.

Problems

There are some problems with this idea:

• The implicit assumption overriding this whole idea is that the difference in attendance is entirely (or primarily) because of the opponent. Of course, there are lots of other possible reasons. A huge storm could affect attendance, right Georgia? There may be some big event going on in the city, like Super Bowl parties, right Philly? A team that was expected to be successful but is having a particularly bad season may see attendance drop. (I was going to say “right Albany or Toronto?” but despite their records this year, their attendance hasn’t dropped.) Alternatively, the team may be having a big promotion that bumps attendance regardless of the opponent, like the St. Patrick’s Day game in Calgary (see below). I imagine that happens in Buffalo for Tucker Out Lymphoma nights too.

• Fans from the opposing team may travel to their team’s away games. You see this a lot in Toronto, Buffalo, and Rochester since they’re so close together, but there are people who travel to see their team play in any opposing barn. If a team has a positive draw, it’s impossible to know if that’s because their fans travel a lot or if the home team fans turn out to see that team more than other teams. Likely some of both.

• The draw numbers for a place like Buffalo aren’t especially meaningful over the last couple of years because they get a sell-out, or within a couple thousand of a sell-out, pretty much every game. Similarly, the Rock are playing in a small arena this season, so their attendance figures are at or near the max as well. Which team they’re playing doesn’t much matter.

• Each team plays nine home games and each opponent visits once or maybe twice in a season, so the small sample size means the numbers may not be that meaningful. One outlier can greatly affect the outcome. For example, Buffalo’s draw was 730 before the Calgary game this past weekend, and then it almost doubled to 1393. But Calgary frequently gets higher-than-average attendance at their St. Paddy’s day game, so would Buffalo have drawn that much in Calgary if the game was next weekend instead?

All-time numbers

If we take all games in the history of the NLL and calculate the draw for each team, the numbers are even harder to interpret. The teams with the highest draws are:

• Pittsburgh Crossefire, 2102
• Detroit Turbos, 1938
• Chicago Shamrox, 1598
• Pittsburgh Bulls, 1268
• New England Blazers, 1235

I’d bet that a good chunk of readers have never heard of the Crossefire or Bulls, and didn’t know that Pittsburgh has had two different NLL teams. The Crossefire were originally the Baltimore Thunder, played one year in Pittsburgh (2000), then moved to DC to become the Washington Power, and then moved again to Colorado where they’ve been the Mammoth since 2003. The Bulls played from 1990–1993.

None of these top five teams played more than four or five seasons. The teams that have played 20+ years (Rock, Roughnecks, Bandits, Knighthawks, etc.) all have draw numbers much closer to 0, implying that the positives and negatives tend to cancel each other out over time.

The Bandits are the highest ranking (20th) of the currently-existing teams with a draw of 129. The Bandits and the Roughnecks (89) are the only current teams with a positive draw. San Diego (–857), Vancouver (–1178), and Ottawa (–1727) are three of the bottom six teams.

Does this mean that everybody wanted to see the Crossfire and Turbos, while nobody in opposing cities wants to see the Warriors or Black Bears? I doubt it.

Conclusion

The idea of this statistic is something like “all other things being equal, when team X is the visiting team in any arena, attendance changes by <this much> on average.” The problem here is that “all other things being equal” is nowhere close to true. There are so many other factors involved in the reason why a particular game might have high or low attendance that trying isolate one of those – the visiting team – is next to impossible. Thus I don’t think this stat tells us anything meaningful.