Potential Knicks NBA Finals tickets are selling for more than $100,000

A slice of pizza from Joe’s, a bagel from Zabar’s, a dirty water dog — only in New York. Getting gouged $100,000 for a ticket to a basketball game — also, only in New York. Knicks fans who are dying to see their team return to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 are facing some of the most astonishing prices imaginable on the secondary market. Prices for the first home game of the finals at Madison Square Garden have gone through the stratosphere, and even nosebleed seats are selling for an eye-watering price.

Tickets for the Eastern Conference Finals are going for upwards of $500 in the upper deck against the Cavaliers, but <a href=" chump change compared to a prospective NBA Finals game.

Some of the worst seats in the house are selling for over $4,000, with a seat (almost) courtside selling for a ludicrous $77,371. The worst part: Tickets are selling at these prices. This isn’t simply some scalpers trying to get their bag, as a ticket on the right side of courtside sold over the weekend for over $102,000.

The sickening prices are a product of the secondary market gone mad, which has become all too common for, well, everything. Sites that once existed as a way for fans to re-sell tickets to games they could attend have become the breeding ground for grifters, working as part of large computer farms to buy up tickets as soon as they go on sale to everything and then re-list at a higher price. It’s all well and good to enjoy the schadenfreude when a game’s value collapses and they have to eat a loss, but unfortunately, this is the exception and not the rule.

The volume with which resellers operate at means that in the long run, they come out ahead, especially when it comes to the courtside seat example, which would have sold at approximately $7,000 when first listed, ridiculous in its own right, but who cares when someone is willing to re-buy at $100K due to FOMO.

It’s just nice to know that amidst rampant inflation, food insecurity, soaring housing prices, and families struggling to afford childcare, there are people who can spend $100,000 on a ticket to a basketball game. It’s truly the glorious future the founding fathers envisioned for us.

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