The Spurs May Be Near The Top Of The NBA, But Their Tickets Are In The Cellar

Time for another look at the least-wanted NBA tickets of the past month. The list of teams on the discount leaderboard is mostly what you'd expect: the Nets, Kings, Jazz, and Hornets, all lottery teams if the season were to end today.

And then there are the San Antonio Spurs: currently holding the No. 2 seed in the West and the fourth-best record overall, yet selling lots of tickets for less than five bucks.

As before, the numbers come courtesy of Will Flaherty, the director of communications for SeatGeek, an online ticket search engine that compiles the inventory of hundreds of resellers. He ran the numbers for us on NBA ticket prices from Feb. 16 through today, covering games that will be played up to March 31. There are 24 games in that period in which more than half the tickets on the secondary market had or have prices below $10. The home teams for those games, ranked by number of appearances on the list:

• 6 games—Nets • 5 games—Spurs • 4 games—Kings • 3 games—Jazz • 3 games—Hornets • 3 games—Pacers

And here's the list of those 24 games. The Wizards and Bobcats were particularly unpopular attractions on the road:

What about the real ticket dumps? Flaherty found 20 games with more than a third of tickets selling for less than $5 on the secondary markets. San Antonio accounted for one quarter of those:

• 5 games—Spurs • 4 games—Nets • 3 games—Pacers • 3 games—Kings • 3 games—Hornets • 2 games—Jazz

And here is the list of those 20 games. Hawks-Pacers on March 6 was the biggest stinkbomb of all, with 45 percent of resale tickets under $5:

Flaherty did say that the high percentage of low-priced tickets for Spurs games doesn't tell the whole story about the demand in San Antonio:

The average ticket price for a Spurs game is currently at $50 (that's inclusive of all tickets in the stadium), so clearly some fans are paying a premium for quality seats and the low-price inventory we're seeing is almost assuredly in the upper deck of the AT&T Center, but if anything it does seem to signal that great deals can be had in San Antonio to see winning basketball.

So the real dollar stores of the NBA are New Jersey and New Orleans, Flaherty looked for games for which two-thirds of resale inventory was under $10 and 40 percent was under $5. There were three games on that list:

If you want to get as close as possible to bad basketball, this is where you can buy lower-level seats with pocket change.

Take for example this screenshot the Wizards-Nets game that was played Wednesday night in Newark:

(click to enlarge)

Lower-level seats to that game could have been had for as little as $3. If you were willing to open your pocketbook just a bit more, you can sit in Row 5 behind the basket for only $9:

Photo via Getty