Tickets

This page is kept as it was filed. The line above is the whole of what the old desk published at this address: single-game tickets were not on sale through the site, and that is all it said. The address is still linked to from outside, so the page stays, and what follows is the part it never had — how the thing actually works, without prices, because prices are not ours to quote.

Who sells what

Three different sellers get confused with one another. The arena box office sells seats for events in the building, the team sells season tickets and packages for its own games, and the resale market sells seats that somebody else has already bought. They have different rules about refunds, different rules about transfer and different rules about what happens if an event moves, and the one you bought from is the one whose rules apply to you. A site like this one is none of the three.

Why a game can look sold out and not be

Inventory for a basketball game is released in stages rather than all at once. Season-ticket holders have their seats before anything goes on general sale; blocks are held back for the visiting club, for the league, for broadcast positions and for group bookings that have not been paid for yet. Blocks that go unused come back into the pool, sometimes in the last days before the game. So a screen that shows nothing available in October is a statement about that moment and not about the game.

What the seat number does not tell you

The level matters more than the row. A seat in the first rows of an upper level usually sees the play better than a seat in the last rows of the level below it, because the sightline depends on how far back the tier has been pushed rather than on the number printed on the ticket. Behind a basket the pattern reverses: the further up you sit, the more of the offence you can actually follow. Corners are the compromise most regulars settle on.

Getting in

Nothing about the ticket is the slow part of arriving. The queue is at the security line, it is at its worst in the half hour before tip-off, and it is short an hour earlier when the doors have just opened and shoot-around is still going on. What may be carried in changes from season to season and is published by the building rather than by anyone else, which is the one page worth checking on the day.

What this page deliberately does not give you is a price, a seating chart or a link to a seller. Prices move, charts are redrawn when the building reconfigures, and an out-of-date number is worse than no number. For the current state of any of the three, the seller you are buying from is the source. The rest of the section is on the Brooklyn desk.