This article presents another attempt at finding the favorable economic effects claimed by sports team owners and boosters. The article has four peculiarities. First, no attempt is made to build a model explaining the targeted dependent variable; rather, a modified Box-Jenkins procedure is used. Second, the targeted variable, the hotel occupancy rates, is specific to the tourism industry. Third, our estimations are based on monthly data over a period of 10 years. Last, the study deals with Canadian rather than American cities. Overall results are somewhat ambiguous, but there does seem to be some evidence that the hockey lock-out of 1994-1995 did have a negative impact on hotel occupancy rates. © 2005, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.