Good news for die-hard basketball fans: Oracle Arena still has seats available to watch the Golden State Warriors take on the Cleveland Cavaliers in a do-or-die Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
Now for the bad news: Even the nosebleed seats are pricey, and buyers considering spots closest to the action may need a second mortgage —or a rich relative—to afford them.
On Stubhub, the cheapest tickets advertised cost around $700 per ticket. That's fairly expensive, but just wait—it gets worse. Much worse.
For anyone with larger ambitions, courtside seats will run you anywhere from $5,000 to a whopping $125,000 per seat, according to the site's data, where expensive seats saw prices soar from earlier in the day Sunday. When the day began, VIP seats appeared with a comparatively cheaper price tag of $75,000, implying demand was pushing up prices on Stubhub's network.
Last week, Stubhub sold a pair of Game 7 seats for $49,000 apiece, according to a report in ESPN. That was the most expensive non-suite seats in the site's history, a spokesperson noted.
This year's Finals pits the NBA's golden boy, Stephen Curry, against LeBron James—arguably the athlete everyone loves to hate—against one another for the 2nd consecutive year. James is aiming to win his third championship. Curry, who has emerged as one of the most accurate 3-point shooters in the game's history, is attempting to capture his second.
This year's contest is drawing heavy interest, given that the initially heavily-favored Warriors jumped out to an early 3-1 lead in the series—only to squander that advantage as the Cavaliers stormed back to even it up.
The drawn out contest, as well as the viewership and money that comes with it, is an unequivocal boon to the NBA. Yet cynics and the more conspiratorial-minded have argued that NBA officials somehow engineered the unexpectedly competitive contest to boost ratings and revenue.
Curry's wife Ayesha said as much a few days ago on social media, after a few errant calls late in the game got her husband ejected. Her now-deleted tweet, which accused officials of 'absolutely' rigging the game, triggered a firestorm.