Die-hard fans landed tickets for hundreds of dollars, but how much is a memory worth?
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NEW YORK — One humid night some 27 years ago, Jeremy Spicer and his friends were playing H-O-R-S-E with a makeshift hoop at the corner of E. 43rd Street and Foster Avenue, deep in Brooklyn.
Clad in his sweat-soaked Patrick Ewing jersey, he promptly dropped the ball at 6:55 p.m. and ran inside. The Knicks were on, facing the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals, down 2-0 but returning to Madison Square Garden. He went to a handful of games a year with his father back then, and tickets for Game 3 were only $15 at tip. But pa was out of town, so the couch it was.
“It hurt to not see it in person,” Spicer says. “I told myself I’d be there in MSG the next time we were back.”
Now they’re back, and this time the Knicks are up 2-0 as they head to New York, after twice solving Victor Wembanyama in San Antonio. And Spicer has tickets! At 36 and working in finance, he’s a season-ticket holder, which means he was able to purchase his two regular seats for each Finals game at face value: $700 apiece. His faint 9-year-old dream is ready to flutter to life.
Except there’s an $8,000 hitch.
The current resale get-in price for Game 3 at the Garden is $8,201. The average price has more than doubled since Wednesday, with MSG releasing season tickets to their owners and resales starting to pop, cementing these NBA Finals as the most expensive, and least accessible, ever.
It has created the dilemma beating up Knicks season ticket holders, including 15 who spoke with The Washington Post as the clock ticked down toward Game 3: What is a life memory worth?
“A lot of fans are thinking, ‘Hey, this could be something,’” says Alex Warner, CEO of Winventory, a platform that helps season ticket holders resell their tickets. “[But] these once-in-a-lifetime prices are also once-in-a-lifetime experiences.”
Having secured a steady job, Spicer started buying season tickets a few years back. He opted for two seats in the upper deck, a full-court heave from the Knicks’ bench. For 41 games, the package cost him a total of about $6,000 when the Knicks were the worst team in the Eastern Conference. “A way to fill the evenings,” he figured.
He read the fine print, which outlined how his ticket would let him purchase playoff seats at face value if the Knicks ever found themselves there. He scoffed. These are the Knicks, he thought: “Things would have to get very weird for that to matter.”
He’s pretty sure this is all some sort of dark magic, but with each playoff win, Spicer has re-upped for the next series. When it came time to purchase his Finals seats, he immediately put down the $1,400, harking back to the blacktop days. You can’t miss this, he thought.
Then, about a week later, resale sites started allowing season-ticket holders to post tickets. Spicer, whose wife is pregnant with their first child, sat in his Queens apartment and watched the prices rise and rise and rise, finally reaching $9,000 apiece by the time the Knicks stole Game 1 on Wednesday.
He never pictured himself as being willing to market away what, in many ways, is a dream. But he’s been checking StubHub every hour or so and was in deep consideration as of Sunday, with Game 3’s epic — which President Donald Trump was expected to attend — less than 24 hours away.
“If it [sells] close to $10,000,” he says, “that would be too irresponsible [to turn down].”
Among those The Post spoke with, six say they listed their tickets within minutes of receiving them. Each cited varying financial constraints with a central throughline: Turning down more than $8,000 of profit just isn’t reasonable.
Clarence, a 55-year-old retired police officer from Upstate New York, says his dad brought him to games as a kid when tickets were cheap. After dad died at 60 in 2003, a couple years removed from the Knicks’ last Finals appearance, he decided the best way to honor him was to keep going. (Clarence spoke on the condition that he be identified by his first name only; the Knicks, who did not respond to a request for comment, have been rumored to revoke season ticket holders’ privileges if they’re caught reselling during the playoffs.)
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He has a half-season ticket package, which means he’s also been able to attend half of the Knicks’ home playoff games this year, including Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals. After paying $1,400 for two Finals tickets in the upper bowl — one for himself and a friend — he saw no choice but to sell both. His tickets fetched more than $8,000 each within the first few hours of going up.
“Even dad would know it’s a no-brainer,” he says. “That would pay for all of my playoff games and next season’s entire season ticket plan.”
The number of resale listings for Game 3 is actually lower than expected, considering the skyrocketing asking price, and the majority of season ticket holders The Post spoke to say they expected to attend.
A couple blocks over from the Spicers, Jonathan Klug and his wife, Stephanie, shape their lives around the Knicks. They book vacations with the team’s away games, attend a majority of home games and, on the occasion one can’t make it, the other takes a picture at the game, and Jonathan edits the missing link into the photo for their social media. In their friends’ eyes, the pair is always watching the Knicks.
So that’s what he decided they were going to do Monday night. In an effort to shield the mind from temptation, he deleted StubHub back when his level’s seats — which he bought for $700 apiece — were going for only $5,000. They’re currently listed at $8,201.
“My heart won’t let me sell it,” Klug says. “Never take these moments for granted. Enjoy them while they’re here, because you never know when you’re going to see it again.”
Klug, a half-season ticket holder (21 games), had his tickets already jump from $2,400 this season to $3,100 next (for the cheapest full-season tickets, that’s roughly $4,500 to $6,500). Even if the Knicks do somehow return, the tickets might soon be out of reach.
The wealth of New York City’s market has that effect, yet all live sports are drifting toward becoming a luxury commodity. The 2026 Super Bowl drew one of the most expensive average ticket prices in NFL history (though still cheaper than Game 3), and the same was true of the 2026 College Football Playoff championship game. New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium will host the FIFA World Cup final next month, which had a resale ticket list for more than $2 million.
“Demand is always rising,” says Victor Matheson, a sports economist at College of the Holy Cross. “There’s no upper limit on demand, minus maybe a zombie apocalypse. … Prices will keep increasing.”
And Madison Square Garden isn’t getting any bigger — which means, for many season ticket holders, now is the moment to strike. Still, the numbers are hard to turn from.
After the Knicks took Game 2 on Friday night, Spicer thinks he won’t sell his Game 4 ticket now: “If it’s 3-0 going in, knock on wood, that could be the game.” The market has accounted for that, with only one section for Game 4 listing below $14,000 as of Sunday night. While tickets for Game 6 won’t be released for the next week, projected listings place it near $11,000 to get in, which would still rise well above the most expensive average Super Bowl ticket ever (about $9,800) in 2024. For context: Each of the past six NBA Finals had an average ticket price below $2,000.
So after a few minutes, he was back on the couch, he says, his finger drifting from highlights on Instagram back to the Reddit ticket threads and, as it seems to do so frequently these days, the resale site.
Later this month, his wife is due to give birth. He says he will take his child to games early on, ingraining strong ideology, he reasoned. He once fell in love with the sport that way, to the point of obsession as a kid, and he hopes maybe they will, too.
For now, though, he can’t help but stare at the numbers hovering over his section in StubHub’s seat map: $9,066 and counting.
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“I just like to see where it’s at,” he says and keeps scrolling.
