How much do courtside seats cost at NBA arenas?
There is still plenty of time before the new NBA season tips off, but it’s never too early to start saving up for courtside seats at your favorite stadium.
As the NBA season draws to a close, it’s time to start thinking about how you can take your basketball experience to the next level for the following season. Imagine being just an arm’s length away from the league’s top players as you sit courtside at your favorite stadium. It’s an experience like no other, and one that every true NBA fan should consider. You may want to think about saving up now if you want to be prepared for what’s to come.
The courtside experience separates NBA from other leagues
There is no other professional sport in the world where fans can get so close to the athletes that they can have a chat with them, give them some dap, get run over by them or have some of their concession stand purchases swiped by one of the players on the court. It’s what makes the NBA special. The relationship between the fans and the players is one of the most attractive things about the league, and it has been for a long time.
Generally the fans and players get along amicably, and while there might be a bit of banter between opposing teams and the fans sitting court side there have been some instances where tensions have boiled over. With emotions at a boiling point sometimes fans and players can cross the line.
We’ve seen Spike Lee yapping at opponents in Madison Square Garden for ages. This year LeBron James had some one kicked out of a game for jawing at him and the Lakers too much. Chris Paul was involved in a verbal altercation when a young fan in Dallas who apparently was bothering the Suns’ point guards family.
Expect to pay four figures for courtside seats
Most of the time the fans who pay that money to sit on the first row and watch their favorite players in the league on display before their eyes are well behaved, because court side tickets aren’t cheap. They can run anywhere from a few hundred dollars to six figures depending on the game.
How much you pay for a seat right on the hardwood depends on who you are watching, where you are watching and how good the team is. The Dallas Mavericks, for example, used to have the cheapest court side seats in the league because they had been in a terrible spell of missing the playoffs season after season. That all changed when Luka Doncic came to town, and the ticket prices soared from $200 in 2018 all the way up to $8,000 for the most expensive seat at American Airlines Center last year according to TicketSmarter.
The Atlanta Hawks are in that bottom half of the table when it comes to cheapest courtside tickets. They can go anywhere from two to three hundred dollars all the way up to $600 for a primetime match up against a big team.
LA and NY will always be top dogs with the ticket prices
No matter how good or bad the Lakers or the Knicks are, Madison Square Garden and the now Crypto.com Arena are home to the most expensive courtside tickets year in and year out.
They are big market teams, in expensive cities that fetch a hefty price. If you were to shell out the dough to sit front row in one of these arenas, you would most likely be brushing shoulders with celebrities like Spike Lee, or Jack Nicholson. Courtside seats at the Garden or in LA are around three to five thousand dollars depending on the game.
For the conference finals against the Nuggets the top-end sees tickets changing hands for up to $15,338 for courtside resale tickets