PreferredSeat.com Blog

The Sacramento Kings announced a sellout for last night’s Kings vs Lakers game at Arco Arena. But the truth was obvious if you checked Ticketmaster just hours before the game. Up to one thousand seats were still showing on the Ticketmaster web site before the game and nobody can convince me the walk up crowd bought up the remaining overpriced tickets.

The Sacramento Kings were trying out the new variable ticket pricing for last nights game and it appeared to be a failure. In the last few days more and more tickets kept appearing for sale at prices ranging from $89.50 to $369 per seat. The $369 seat is just a $165 face value ticket jacked up over $200 per ticket for the Lakers game. But the Kings tickets did not sell well at all on Ticketmaster the day of the game at the same time ticket brokers were selling out by undercutting the prices Ticketmaster was charging.

This is part of the new fan friendly pricing strategy going on in the NBA to increase revenue and give fans a better price on the poor games while gauging fans on the big games. And to be fair the Kings have lowered the price of that $165 ticket for the bad teams such as the Detroit Pistons. The problem is you can save only $18 by paying only $147 for the usual $165 ticket for the Pistons, while the game you want to see is jacked up over $200 per ticket.

In this day and age you cannot go out in public like the NBA and the Sacramento Kings have done to say they are doing the fans a favor when anyone with an internet connection can see the opposite is true. If you check with a ticket broker and compare NBA ticket prices you may find the same situation as with the Miami Heat and Sacramento Kings where you can get the best price for NBA tickets from ticket brokers.

The NBA is in trouble in a lot of markets and it’s not the fans fault, it’s the greed of the owners and players that is keeping fans away. David Stern can blame Sacramento for not supporting a new arena but when you run off your fans by overcharging them,you get what you deserve. They’ll watch it on tv or buy tickets from the ticket brokers you’ve been marketing to all summer.