Not many free wings: Fans joke lowly Detroit Pistons reason for Wingstop's big growth

All press is good press, right?

That's what Wingstop executives and shareholders are telling themselves after reporting growth in sales and revenue during the fourth quarter of the 2023 fiscal year on Wednesday. The last quarter of the 2023 fiscal year happened to coincide with the company's sponsorship deal with the Detroit Pistons while they endured a 28-game losing streak, the worst in NBA history.

Since the streak started on Oct. 30, Wingstop's stock price has jumped 81% from 177.95 to 322.20 when the stock market opened on Wednesday. In its public reporting for the fourth quarter, Wingstop reported $18.8 million in net income, slightly down from $19.5 million in the third quarter but up 21.7% from 2022's fourth quarter. System-wide sales increased from $885 million in the third quarter to $966 million in the fourth quarter and total revenue climbed to $127.1 million from $117.1 million. Over all of 2023, Wingstop's sales jumped to $3.5 billion, up 27%, and increased total revenue to $460 million, up from $357.5 in 2022.

"2023 marked the strongest year on record for Wingstop where we achieved 18.3% domestic same store sales growth, driven primarily by transactions, and we delivered an unprecedented 20 consecutive years of domestic same store sales growth," said Wingstop president and chief executive officer Michael Skipworth in a press release Wednesday.

If you were previously unaware, the Pistons and Wingstop, a national chicken chain that frequently advertises in the world of sports, partnered before the start of the 2023-24 NBA season as one of the team's sponsors.

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The partnership is the typical one between a professional sports team and a corporate entity, with the Pistons using the Wingstop logo on all of their final score posts on social media. Wingstop is also running a promotion where fans could get five free boneless chicken wings at a Detroit-based location if the Pistons won by using the promotional code "PISTONS" when ordering online.

The two promotions became running jokes for two months straight, as the Pistons lost 28 games in a row between Oct. 28 and Dec. 30. While fans were hungry for any scrap of positivity and a win from the Pistons, they were also clamoring for the handful of free wings. Each final score post during the losing streak also attracted hundreds of thousands of eyeballs each night according to X, formerly Twitter's, analytical numbers provided on each post.

Most posts had a somber tone, just saying "final" while posting the score, but still included the Wingstop logo, which led to jokes each night about the company saving money on the promotion while also being attached to one of the most infamous streaks in recent sports memory. When the Pistons finally beat the Raptors at the end of 2023, it was cause for celebration for the entire NBA world, who joked the long PR nightmare for Wingstop was finally over. The company even got in on the joke that night with a tweet showing they expected a rush of fans to use the long-dormant promotion for free wings.

Before the next game, Wingstop fired off another tweet encouraging the Pistons to continue winning, but Detroit lost the next seven games on the schedule, prompting the first of many trades this season, before their next win on Jan. 15 against the Wizards.

While the growth cannot be attributed to the link to the Pistons' sheer ineptitude this season, it couldn't have hurt having all those extra eyeballs from the NBA world seeing their logo while laughing at Detroit's plight.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Fans joke lowly Detroit Pistons reason for Wingstop's big growth