It's been eight years since Ottawa Senators fans had a chance to enjoy the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and because so much has changed since then, there's no shortage of questions in the market about what's coming up and how/when playoff tickets will be rolled out.
After the Senators officially clinched at least the second wild card spot in the Eastern Conference on Tuesday night, Leeder huddled fielded questions from the media on Wednesday morning.
Q: Can you sum up what it means for the organization and the city that they'll be back in the playoffs?
A: I mean, it's fantastic. It's exciting. It's long overdue. So, I think we're all walking with a little jump in our step this morning. It's good for the community, obviously, as well for Ottawa-Gatineau. It's the bars, the restaurants, the hotels. It's good for everybody. So, it's fantastic.
Q: When do you anticipate your first game of the first round will be?
A: "Not sure yet. All we've been told from the league is that it's likely the East (schedule) will open on the Sunday (April 20). So that could be Sunday or Monday it'll open."
Q: Do you have a preference on who you'd like to see in the first round?
A: "You know, it's bad karma to pick your opponent. So, I'm not going to do that. But, you know, obviously, I think a lot of fans would like to see the Battle of Ontario. That would be a lot of fun. Steve Staios will probably have his own views on that as well. But no, we're happy to be in the situation we're in right now. We're happy that we've got a little bit of time now to do a bit of planning. It wasn't a last game of the year type of thing. That helps us as well."
Q: You’ve had a good run recently with ticket sales. Do you expect even more frenzy today (now that you've clinched)?
A: "Yeah, we had a lot of frenzy in the last 24 hours. So, we sold 50 season seats yesterday. We had 50 yesterday and over 200 inquiries last night after the clinching, which is a lot for us. So, that's exciting. We've added almost 600 new season seat owners in the last five weeks. And we expect that to continue as we lead up to the playoffs. So, we've got some work to do to rebuild our season seat base. And nothing helps that more than getting in the playoffs. It's huge."
Q: So, what's the priority between now and your first home playoff game?
A: "So, what we'll do is we'll go out to our season seat owners now and make sure they've got what they need. We're going to sell to new season seat owners. That's going to take place probably over another week. And then we'll assess where the inventory is at. Then we'll go out to the general public somewhere between the 15th and the 18th of April. We'll get to them with single individual game tickets.
"And then the rest of the planning is in full steam. We've got to find 80,000 rally towels here in about 10 days. We've got to get them here to Ottawa. We've got plans for the CIBC Red Zone Plaza. We're going to activate that. We've got to get that going. What are we going to do out there? We've got to hire bands. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate. We'll have some outdoor patios for restaurants. Do all the planning in the arena, game production. We want that to elevate a bit. What can we do differently? What can we bring into it to help that?
"There's a lot of planning going on right now. And it's a good problem to have. Our staff, as I said, are pretty excited about the opportunity to show what they can do at playoff time."
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