Jeff Mosier of the Dallas Morning News reports:
Attendance at Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game at Cowboys Stadium will be Texas-size, but ticket prices in many cases are far more modest this year.
The cost of seats – or space in standing-room-only decks – in the resale market is down dramatically from recent years. The 92,000-plus sellout crowd in Arlington is expected to be the nation’s largest audience for a basketball game. That’s more people than the combined attendance of the last five NBA All-Star Games.
“Given the much larger venue size, this is the most affordable NBA All-Star Game we’ve seen since we’ve begun tracking prices,” said Joellen Ferrer, a spokeswoman for online ticket marketplace StubHub.com.
So far, the average price for the basketball game is $186 on StubHub. In the previous five years, the averages ranged from $508 in Denver to $2,546 in Las Vegas. The huge numbers of upper deck seats and standing-room-only tickets, which have a $30 face value, probably brought down the average…
However, the toughest tickets in town won’t necessarily be found in Arlington. Seats at the All-Star Saturday Night event, which features the three-point shooting and slam dunk contests, start at $225 on FanSnap.com. And with some seats on sale for $3,450, VIPs will pay nearly as much for a prime spot there as at the All-Star Game.
“That can happen now and again, but the norm is that the game is the bigger draw,” Anderson said. “It depends on what participants are in the dunk contest. … If you’ve got a big showdown brewing, that can be the case.”
