The Most Unwanted Tickets Of The NBA Season Were In New Orleans

Now that the NBA's regular season is over, it's time to wrap-up our analysis of NBA tickets that had the least demand. Once again, we turned to Will Flaherty, the director of communications for SeatGeek, the online ticket search engine that compiles data from hundreds of resellers. This time, Flaherty took a look at which individual sections in which NBA arenas were fetching the cheapest prices on the secondary market. Flaherty's analysis also quantified which game won the NBA title for discounted regular-season ticket prices.

All told, there were nine seating sections across the league in which tickets sold on average for less than $10 for the entirety of the season. And Section 306 of the New Orleans Arena, located in one of the corners at the top of the building, had the least demand of those sections. The New Orleans Hornets finished with the worst record in the Western Conference (21-45). But just how low did their ticket prices go? Flaherty's data helps explain:

• Tickets in Section 306 at New Orleans Arena sold for $8.06 on average. • 50 percent of the tickets in that section sold for $4 or less. • Fans paid only $1 for tickets in Section 306 for 15 different games, including when the Clippers and the Thunder were in town. • The highest price paid for a ticket in NOLA's Section 306 was $41 for the March 14 game against the Lakers—a night when the average resale price for a seat in that section was just $21.38.

Turns out New Orleans also had the second-cheapest section in the league. Here's a chart that displays the 10 sections throughout the NBA that had the lowest demand for tickets, based on the average resale ticket price:

Now that we know which sections were priced the lowest, what about the game that topped the NBA season's discount leaderboard? It, too, was in New Orleans. The April 11 Kings-Hornets game had 55 percent of its tickets sell on the secondary market for less than $5, while a whopping 78 percent went for less than $10. Both percentages were the highest for any NBA game played this season. But that's not all: That same game also had an average resale ticket price of $10.74—the lowest average cost for any of the NBA's 2011-12 regular-season games.