PreferredSeat.com Blog

Lebron James would like the NBA to get smaller. Like the good old days when the Lakers and Celtics ruled the NBA. Lebron was talking with reporters before the Thursday night game in Phoenix where he made the remarks.

Among his comments were:

“It’s not my job; I’m a player, but that is why the league was so great,” James said. “Imagine if you could take Kevin Love off Minnesota and add him to another team and you shrink the (league). Looking at some of the teams that aren’t that great, you take Brook Lopez or you take Devin Harris off these teams that aren’t that good right now and you add him to a team that could be really good.

NBA teams have been using the new variable ticket pricing model for a couple of years now and fans are finding they can buy NBA tickets for the premier teams much cheaper on the resell market from ticket brokers than they can directly through the NBA and Ticketmaster in many cases.

For tomorrow nights game in Phoenix with the Suns in a marquee matchup with the Miami Heat the Phoenix Suns have jacked up the ticket prices so much that an upper level seat in the last row will run you $112.50 per seat. But at the same time at PreferredSeat.com you can find NBA tickets for the Suns vs Heat tickets running just $50 and up. And much better seats than the Suns are offering are only $75 per seat.

The same has been seen with the Miami Heat games at the American Airlines Arena and the Sacramento Kings games at Arco Arena. For regular season games you can often get a much better price from PreferredSeat.com than you can from the NBA.

With the NBA having to buy up teams now because they can’t sell them and a strike looming next season you would think they would be working harder to give the fans a better deal rather than giving them a break on games they could care less about, and jacking up the price of the premier teams like the Heat, Celtics and Lakers.

The NBA and Ticketmaster should be thanked for finally coming up with the interactive seating charts which make it just as easy to compare seats with PreferredSeat.com, which also show the complete price of  tickets they sell without any hidden service fees.

A few NBA teams are trying out variable ticket pricing to bring in more revenue for the bigger teams such as the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers when they come to town. The Utah Jazz and Sacramento Kings are a few of the first to do so and hope to recover lost income from a few bad years.

With variable ticket pricing the teams will raise the ticket prices right off the top for all the premium NBA games before they go on sale to the general public. Season ticket holders won’t notice a difference but when a fan goes to the box office he will be paying much more to see the Kings playing against the Lakers than he will for the Clippers and Kings game. 

And they didn’t lower the Clippers ticket price; they just raised the price to see the Kings Lakers game.

The Sacramento Kings vice president of marketing told the Sacramento Bee that fan surveys and consumer opinions helped them make the decision as well as several major league baseball teams that already use variable ticket pricing. I cannot imagine that any Sacramento Kings fans told the representatives of the Kings they wanted to pay more money to see the Heat and the Lakers than they were already paying.

Nice try but we’re not buying it.

Sure they’re rolling out the cheap ticket packages this year, but that has nothing to do with variable ticket pricing. They simply cannot sell tickets to a bad team in one of the worst hit cities by the economic crisis in the country. And in typical Kings fashion are spinning a yarn about how the fans asked for this.

The Sacramento Kings president of business operations, Matina Kolokotonis said in the Sacramento Bee recently, “Similar to the successful model used by the hotel and airline industries, we are aligning our pricing to better match the demand set by the market”.  So they want to make more money and who doesn’t. But stop saying you are doing it for the fan. Cut salaries and you’ll do something for the fan.

 Are the Sacramento Kings doing the fans a favor by following the airline industries method of generating revenue? Everyone hates the airline industry for it. And it will further alienate the fans of the Sacramento Kings and all sports fans because unlike the airline industry, they have other choices. It’s called a big screen television and the more they screw with the fans, the better the couch will look.

In most cities it won’t be the Lakers and Heat games that will be affected as much because they are packaging those games with others to sell them before the public on sale. But if a team suddenly turns hot, expect the ticket prices to go up. And if a game is not selling, the season ticket holder may find he is paying much more than guy that just walked up to the box office and bought the ticket next to him.

You can buy basketball tickets from a sports ticket broker such as Preferred Seating Tickets as well as the box office. The difference is that Preferred Seating works with season ticket holders and usually have much better seats for NBA games than the box office. But, you will pay more for the best teams and sometimes less than the season ticket holder as well for the bad selling games.