From the sellout crowds and throngs of fans who have turned Maple Leaf Square into Jurrasic Park, to the record-breaking viewership (Friday’s Game 6 was watched by more than one million, making it the highest-rated basketball game ever in Canada, there are plenty of clues that during this brief but exhilarating playoff run the Raptors are winning over more fans than ever before.
The team’s current wave of popularity is just as evident at the box office, where the Raps boast the highest average ticket price on the secondary online market—tickets sold through websites such as StubHub, not those originally sold by the team and MLSE—a plain result of supply and demand. Raptors fans have spent an average of $384.17 to watch their team play in the flesh.
Before last week’s Game 5 at the Air Canada Centre, a Forbes article listed the average secondary-market ticket price at $381.55, making it at the time not only the most expensive Raptors ticket, but the sixth most expensive in the NBA since ticket search engine TiqIq.com began keeping data five years ago. Should the series return to Toronto for a deciding game, the article noted, the projected average price as of April 29 was a whopping $638, which would have made it the single most expensive NBA first-round ticket on record. For comparison’s sake, secondary tickets for game six in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center went for an average cost of $269.03.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Game 7: ticket prices plummeted.
Don’t get me wrong, you can still feed a family for weeks on what it’ll cost to take a seat at the Air Canada Centre Sunday afternoon, but the average online ticket price has leveled off to the numbers we saw for Game 5. “The biggest factor,” says Forbes contributor and Founder/CEO of TiqIQ.com, “was that quantity almost doubled. More people who would have gone to the game decided to sell because the price was so high, and ultimately the result was that prices caved.”
To wit: On April 30 there were 1,200 tickets available, yet over the weekend that number rose to 2,200. As of Saturday night, the average price for secondary tickets was $367.00 and the lowest you could pay to get in the door was $153.00.
Interestingly, of the five NBA Game 7s this weekend and the three in the NHL last week, today’s game is the only one in which the price is actually lower than the series average.
Game 7 may no longer be the biggest cash cow in first-round history for online vendors and scalpers, but it’s undoubtedly the most important for Raps fans. The winner of today’s contest goes on to face the Miami Heat in Round 2. It would mark the Raptors first return to the second round since the 2000-01 season. Tip-off is at 1pm.