PreferredSeat.com Blog

With the economy in a rut NBA tickets are sure to be a bargain in many markets this year and where you buy your basketball tickets is important if you want to save money. Many NBA teams contacted ticket brokers throughout the country in the offseason and convinced many to buy season tickets for their teams.

Right now there seems to be an abundance of NBA tickets available on the market. For poor performing teams and those in depressed economic markets such as Sacramento, California, it can mean cheaper Sacramento Kings ticket prices from ticket brokers such as Preferred Seating than the face value Kings fans will pay at Ticketmaster.

Take tonight’s Sacramento Kings vs. Lakers game at Arco Arena as an example. Here’s a quick comparison of tickets available at for the face value at Ticketmaster, and at PreferredSeat.com as of 9am.

As you can see you can save anywhere from 30 – 50% per ticket and save up to $100 or more for the big games.  And the same percentage of savings can be found for the poor selling teams such as Minnesota where you can find lower level center court seats in section 115 row U starting at $57 per ticket at Preferred Seating tickets. You’ll pay $85.50 for a similar seat further back in section 115 row Y at Ticketmaster.

The NBA’s new variable ticket pricing is not going to work in this economy and not just for the teams traditionally at the bottom of the barrel. For the Miami Heat home opener against the Orlando Magic on October 29th ticket brokers were selling seats for 50% less than Ticketmaster.

So before you jump on the internet to buy NBA tickets for your favorite team at Ticketmaster, you may want to check out a ticket broker at the same time and compare NBA ticket prices and pay for the parking, food and drinks with the savings. And that can add up to big savings!

 The season home opener for the Miami Heat is tonight against the Orlando Magic at American Airlines Arena and you can still find tickets for the game at Ticketmaster because the game is not sold out. And it probably would be if Ticketmaster wasn’t asking $170 per ticket for section 413 row 12, one of the worst seats in the house.

At the same time Preferredseat.com has NBA tickets for today’s game in section 311 row 12 at $85 a seat which is one half the prices of Miami Heat tickets at Ticketmaster. And the price savings are not just for the premium NBA teams. The Sacramento Kings have tickets in section 205 row Q priced at $35 per seat plus service fees for the home opener against the Toronto Raptors at Arco Arena at the same time Preferredseat.com has the same section and row at $13 per ticket.

The Miami Heat and Sacramento Kings are both employing the latest  scam for selling tickets called “variable ticket pricing“ where the remaining tickets for popular games are jacked up to extreme levels that don’t always reflect current market value. But what they are finding is ticket brokers will be undercutting them every which way and providing fans a better ticket at a cheaper price.

This is going to be a tough year for the NBA with the economy still in the dumps and contract negotiations coming up. And just like the concert business is finding out, you can’t put all the costs of the artists and athletes lavish lifestyles on the fans, or they’ll stop going to live events. Except for the World Series!

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.