Washington Wizards tickets for as low as $2.50! New Jersey Nets tickets for as little as a penny! We've had some fun in recent weeks with the depressed resale prices of individual game tickets in certain NBA markets. But where is demand for tickets the lowest? What teams have lost the most face value?
Will Flaherty is the director of communications for SeatGeek, an online ticket search engine that compiles the inventory of hundreds of resellers. Flaherty did an initial analysis of the NBA's weakest home draws and isolated what percentage of tickets were selling for $5 or less and $10 or less. To which he added:
I did the same analysis on last January as well as this January to try and tease out whether or not there was any lockout-related hangover affecting ticket sales.
The results (which I've copied below), were admittedly mixed. Some teams (most notably the Nets, Pistons, and to some degree Hawks) have seen a substantial proportion of their secondary market inventory sell at distressed prices. Some teams—including the Spurs, Pacers, and Hornets—have actually seen decreases in the amount of secondary inventory selling at distressed prices.
That said, nearly all of these teams have a double-digit percentage of their tickets selling for under $10, which likely means much of that inventory is selling below face value, so it's not really a rosy picture for any of these teams.
Here is the chart Flaherty provided to show how resale prices compared from January of last year to January of this year in those 10 cities he analyzed:
Flaherty then looked at all NBA games through Feb. 1. Six teams—the Hornets, Timberwolves, Nets, Spurs, Jazz, and Pacers—-had more than 25 percent of their online resale tickets priced at less than $10. Those six teams, plus the Grizzlies, had at least 10 percent of their resales priced under $5. He provided an additional chart to show these findings:
But which matchups were the least attractive? Flaherty also compiled a list of the 25 NBA games through Feb. 1 with the highest percentage of low-priced tickets. Three games had a whopping 50 percent of their online resale inventory sell for less than $5, with the Jan. 3 game between the Bucks and Jazz in Utah having had 53 percent going for $5 or less and 72 percent going for $10 or less. Flaherty's chart listing the 25-lowest price games is here: