NBA Finals: Would you pay $4,000 – for a nosebleed seat?
By Matt Egan, CNN
New York (CNN) — Tickets to the NBA Finals in New York are so hot that fans are spending thousands of dollars – even for nosebleed seats.
The cheapest tickets to the New York Knicks home games at Madison Square Garden are selling for nearly $4,000 each, according to secondary marketplace TickPick.
That’s roughly five times the “get-in” price to sit in the cheapest seats at the home of the San Antonio Spurs when the same two teams face off Wednesday night.
And some almost-courtside seats near celebrity row at MSG are listed for $220,000 a pop on SeatGeek, another popular ticket marketplace.
The sky-high prices in New York reflect the fact that the Knicks haven’t been to the NBA Finals this century, the Garden is one of the most iconic venues in the world, and the region is home to plenty of sports fans with deep pockets.
“Even the wealthy fans are getting priced out,” Sal Galatioto, president of investment bank Galatioto Sports Partners, told CNN. “I’m a huge Knicks fan. Would I spend $100,000 to see a game? No way. Not even if you held a gun to me.”
‘A Super Bowl moment’
The NBA Finals at the Garden are having “a Super Bowl moment, price-wise,” said Matt Ferrel, TickPick’s head of marketing.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Ferrel said.
It’s so expensive to attend a Finals game at the Garden that Knicks fans could book a roundtrip flight to Texas, grab a hotel room for three nights, and buy tickets to Games 1 and 2 in San Antonio – and still have hundreds of dollars left over.
Consider:
- The cheapest seats to Games 1 and 2 in San Antonio are listed for about $750 and $1,100, respectively.
- Roundtrip direct flights between New York and San Antonio can be found for about $700, according to Kayak.
- A four-night hotel stay in downtown San Antonio will cost around $600.
The $3,150 total is well below the nearly $4,000 cost of attending the cheapest Finals game at the Garden.
NY and NJ fans head to Texas
Some Knicks fans appear to have decided to follow that cheaper alternative and go to Texas.
According to TickPick, about 20% of the purchases for Game 1 in San Antonio are from customers with billing zip codes in New York. Another 7.5% are from New Jersey and 8% are from Florida, where many New Yorkers have relocated.
That rivals the nearly 38% of transactions on TickPick from Texas.
The trend is even more pronounced for this weekend.
About 30% of the purchases to Game 2 in San Antonio are from New York zip codes, while another 11% are from New Jersey and 3% from Florida, according to TickPick. By comparison, 31% of the transactions are from Texas zip codes.
“The New York fanbase is pervasive, travels well and has the wealth to do it,” Ferrel said.
Three San Antonio-area hotels, the Thompson San Antonio-Riverwalk, Omni La Mansion del Rio and Mokara Hotel & Spa, told CNN that they’ve received inquiries from NYC-based travelers for the NBA Finals.
Armaan Aimani, a 25-year-old living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, is flying to San Antonio on Friday morning to attend Game 2.
Aimani, who works as a tech consultant, told CNN he spent $1,800 for a ticket in the upper deck and paid for his airfare and hotel by using rewards points.
“When tickets for MSG were released, it was disappointing to see the reality of the prices. The get-in price is more than the average cost of rent in the city,” Aimani said. “But then I thought about how much more disappointing it would be to miss an event I’ve been waiting for since my first basketball memory.”
Aimani said he plans to enjoy being with other Knicks fans “crazy enough to travel for a game” and explore San Antonio before heading back to New York.
‘I can’t afford those prices’
The last time the Knicks were in the Finals in 1999, current star point guard Jalen Brunson was just a toddler, Napster had just launched, and The Sopranos was wrapping up its first season on HBO.
The franchise hasn’t won a championship since 1973, when legends Willis Reed and Walt “Clyde” Frazier defeated the Los Angeles Lakers.
Rey Cuenca, a Knicks fan from Queens, paid $500 apiece for nosebleed seats to see the Knicks with his wife at the Eastern Conference Finals last month. But Cuenca, who works as a consultant, said he’s priced out for the Finals.
“Ticket prices are crazy,” he told CNN. “That’s madness. I’m definitely not going to go. As much as I love the Knicks, I can’t afford those prices.”
The $3,973 price tag for the cheapest seats at the Garden during the Finals is about $100 more than the combined “get-in” price for every remaining home game this season for the New York Mets and Yankees, along with every home game for the New York Giants, according to TickPick.
In other words, fans could go to 115 local baseball and football games for the price of one nosebleed seat at the NBA Finals.
Another factor likely driving up costs: The Knicks have not put tickets up for sale to the general public since clinching their ticket to the Finals last week.
The Knicks reportedly canceled a planned pre-sale last week for local fans in the team’s “Fan First” program.
Neither the Knicks nor TicketMaster, the team’s official ticket seller, responded to requests for comment.
This has combined to make Finals tickets at the Garden even scarcer, inflating prices on the secondary market.
Marc Ganis, president of SportsCorp, a Chicago-based sports business consulting firm, said the high prices for Knicks tickets reflect the strength of the upper end of New York City’s economy.
“There is a lot of money sloshing around New York City,” he said. “Basketball is the sport among the Wall Street crowd and the artists and musicians who want to show off on Instagram.”
Ganis pointed to record-high stock prices and the iconic status of the Garden, which Michael Jordan famously called the “Mecca of basketball.”
“This is all about the high end,” Ganis said. “The middle and the low can’t afford these prices.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
