NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- How do you put a price on a once-in-a-lifetime experience? That’s the dilemma facing diehard New York Knicks fans.
Season-ticket holders, who have loyally stuck with their team through its ups and many downs, can buy seats for the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden at face value. It’s a chance to see their beloved team compete against the San Antonio Spurs on their home court in what may be the only championship run since they were born. Or, they can sell their tickets for enough money to pay for school tuition, a full kitchen renovation or tickets to all of next season’s home games combined.
Single tickets in prime spots are listed for more than $100,000 on resale sites like SeatGeek. Even seats in the nosebleeds are going for thousands of dollars ahead of Monday’s Game 3, the first matchup of the Finals that will be played at the Garden in the heart of New York City.
“You could make so much money it’s crazy,” said 26-year-old Rebecca Chasen, who attends games with her father. He has had Knicks season tickets for 35 years. When the team last reached the Finals, Chasen was at the Garden in her mother’s womb.
Her father, whose seats are in the 200s section, could make four or five times the $750 per ticket he paid for his Finals tickets if he sold them, she said.
But she knows he’ll never sell. “The Knicks are everything to him,” Chasen said.
A longtime punchline, the Knicks are playing in their first NBA Finals since 1999, back when Rudy Giuliani was New York City’s mayor. If they win, it will be the first championship since Willis Reed and Walt Frazier powered the team to victory in 1973. That means anyone under the age of 27 hasn’t seen the basketball team compete for a championship, let alone win one. The only Knicks faithful to have experienced that honor are at least 53 years old.
Jesse Derris, a self-professed diehard Knicks fan from the suburbs of New York, admits he checked a resale site to see how much his two tickets to Games 3 and 4 could fetch. For Game 3 alone, he said he could get $72,000 for the pair of seats in the 100s level.
“It would be hard to contemplate” selling the tickets, said Derris, 45, who works in public relations and attends games with the season tickets that his father-in-law first started purchasing 40 years ago. “To me, it’s priceless. There’s nothing that would make me miss the games.”
Season-ticket holders have a significant advantage in the race to obtain seats in the Finals. They have the right of first refusal to purchase their seats for playoff games at face value. For Finals games, those tickets are priced significantly higher than the regular season, but still cost much less than buying that ticket on a resale market.
Bloomberg
Many Knicks supporters have been going to the games for years, or decades, even as the team struggled. Some inherited their fandom from their parents, or cherish attending with their children. During the Knicks’ clean sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers, elated fans celebrated in the streets and recounted a surreal experience of public joy and camaraderie. Even President Donald Trump has said he plans to attend an NBA Finals game.
For some fans, there’s no payday worth missing out on 48 minutes of playing time that they have waited their entire lives to see. But the enormity of the potential windfall is tempting.
“I still do not know what I’m going to do,” said Peter Gelman, 58, an insurance agent who was born into Knicks fandom.
His family has owned season tickets for more than 60 years. The last time the Knicks won it all, Gelman was 5 years old and stayed home while his dad and grandfather celebrated at the Garden.
Selling his two Finals tickets, which cost $6,500 each, could help pay for next year’s season-ticket package. This season, he paid $1,275 per ticket per game for his seats, which are in a premium area directly behind the scorer’s table. A group of friends buy some of those tickets from him every year to help offset the rising cost.
More than anything, he’s heartbroken for his two kids, both die-hard Knicks fans in their 20s, who have never seen the team make it to the Finals. “I feel bad for them because, if anyone’s going, it’s me and my dad,” Gelman said.
Another Knicks fan since childhood, hospital system leader Deb Brown bought season tickets a decade ago, in part to honor her father, a Queens native who died years earlier. “It was important to me to raise my kids to understand fandom is important, your team is important,” she said. “Even if it’s a crappy team, they're still your team and you have to show up.”
The Knicks were a disappointment for decades, with fans blaming the front office for poor draft picks and bad hiring decisions. The team failed to make the playoffs in 16 of the past 25 seasons. Their poor performance was even an inside joke in the 2020 Pixar animated film “Soul.”
As of Monday, other seats in Brown’s section in the 100s level were being offered for anywhere between $12,000 and $33,822 each. But Brown said she has no plans to sell her two tickets to Game 3. “I was talking to my brother and my mom, and we all agreed that not selling is a form of honoring my dad,” Brown said.
The average ticket price to Game 3 at the Garden is more than $6,700 on the resale market, according to SeatGeek. That’s more than double the price of a seat for the first or second game in San Antonio.
The steepest ticket price is for a potential Game 6 at the Garden and is averaging $7,341, according to SeatGeek.
Josh Vlasto, a season-ticket holder for the past three years, said he could make more than five times what he paid if he sells his pair of tickets to Game 6, which will be played if needed.
“I am so tempted to do it that I have actually loaded the tickets on a resale site, just to test it out,” said Vlasto, a 44-year-old partner at a communications and consulting firm. “And I can't press the button.”
In those moments, he thinks about attending Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers with his 8-year-old son last month, when the Knicks eked out an improbable win at the Garden.
“It’s 10:45 on a school night and they're down 22 points, and I said to him ‘Hey buddy, I think we better go home,’” Vlasto said. “He said, ‘Just one more minute.’ And then boom. It’s like a movie. There’s nothing like it.”
“It’s expensive, and it’s a luxury,” he said. “But it is worth every penny.”
Thomas Kazi, 31, has owned a quarter season ticket plan – meaning he gets 11 regular season games – for six years. It gave him early access to purchase four tickets to Game 4 of the Finals for $2,200 per seat in the 100s level.
Over the weekend, he sold two of the seats for a combined $15,000. He’s getting the best of both worlds: He made a profit of $6,200 and will still attend the game with one friend.
“I couldn’t imagine paying that for a game, but this is like what that 27-year drought has led to,” Kazi said. “You have the rest of your life to make money, and when are we going to have this opportunity again?”
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