Maybe not everybody.
Luke Russert, the MSNBC correspondent whose family has held Wizards season tickets since 1994, called a sports-talk show on the team’s flagship radio station weeks into the season to voice his disgust with the team’s lousy play.
“There have been a lot of bad Wizards teams since 1994; this one is so fundamentally awful, I can’t give the tickets away,” Russert said on “The Mike Wise Show with Holden Kushner” on WJFK “The Fan” (106.7 FM). Russert called the team an “abomination” and said: “I don’t see how they get better from this.”
But here’s what Russert didn’t say: whether he plans to give up his expensive seats next season.
Bargain hunter’s bonanza
Outside the arena before a recent game, nine ticket scalpers clustered near the Gallery Place Metro station exit on F Street NW, scanning for potential buyers. There were few nibbles.
“It’s easier to sell the circus than the Wizards,” one scalper said.
“We used to go get seafood after,” said another. “Now we get Oodles of Noodles. It’s all we can afford.”
“Nobody wants to see this team,” complained a third.
The scalpers declined to give their names. Inside the arena, an announcement boomed over the public-address system: “It is illegal to buy or sell tickets outside the Verizon Center.”
Not to worry, the scalpers said. “The market is dead, just like the Wizards’ season,” one declared, citing the team’s bad play and the ascendancy of Internet resale sites such as StubHub, where cut-rate tickets are plentiful and have turned buyers into bargain hunters looking for the next 30-cent ticket for an arena where the cheapest season tickets are $9.50.
Jim Van Stone, the team’s senior vice president of sales, said the infamous 30-cent tickets to a January game against the Toronto Raptors were “an extreme outlier.”
But those weren’t even the cheapest Wizards tickets sold on the site this year, according to StubHub spokeswoman Joellen Ferrer. Two first-row, 400-level tickets to the Bobcats game went for a dime each, plus fees, she said.
Seventy-three Wizards tickets have sold for less than $1, and 160 have sold for $5 or less, generally for upper-level seats at games against teams lacking serious star power. (Bargains will be harder to find for Saturday’s game against the Los Angeles Clippers and their high-flying human highlight reel, Blake Griffin, or next Friday’s game against the Miami Heat.)
“It can certainly make you cringe a little bit,” Van Stone said of the cut-rate tickets offered by season-ticket holders and others with extras. But, he said, 30 cents or even $5 is nowhere near the team’s resale average. It’s $53.89, according to StubHub — but that’s $25 less than the league’s average ticket price via the site and well below the home-game averages for the Los Angeles Lakers ($145), New York Knicks ($135) and the Heat ($116).
It’s also $10 less than the average price of a Wizards home ticket on StubHub just two seasons ago, Ferrer said, suggesting a weakening Wizards market.
The low resale prices are devaluing the team’s season tickets, said Darren Rovell, who covers sports business for CNBC.
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