Alright, I’m back from vacation. Kyle did a nice job with the site and afforded me the opportunity to not have to write about the pitiful Sixers, who are down 3-1 to the Knicks in round one of the playoffs:

What are we looking at here? We’re looking at prices for Game 5 in Madison Square Garden. On Ticketmaster, the cheapest thing I could find as of 9:30 a.m. was $485 for a seat in the hinterlands portion of the arena. There are only a handful of tickets in the lower bowl less than $1,000, while some of the courtside seats are going for upward of $5,000, $8,000, even $10,000.

There’s been a lot of hemming and hawing about Knicks fans taking over the Wells Fargo Center for Games 3 and 4, and while the optics are a total embarrassment considering how loyal and dedicated and hardcore we think we are, there are two obvious reasons for why it happened:

  1. it’s cheaper for Knicks fans to go to a road game 2 hours away
  2. there’s a lot of juice for the Knicks and little juice for the Sixers

The first one is obvious. Look at how much these bozos have to pay to see their team play at home. The tickets are only affordable if you’re a Wall Street douchebag or Bernie Madoff himself, so Joey from the Bronx is priced out. That’s why Joey got a train ticket or drove to Philly to see his team, because it was the easier way to do it.

Second, you’re talking about a Knicks team that has stunk for years, just one playoff series win in 10 seasons. In the same way fans were juiced for the Sixers going into that 2017-2018 season, Knicks fans are juiced for their team, which is finally turning a corner after years of dreck. They are on a massive upward swing and the Sixers are not.

Why? Because the Sixers were a play-in team welcoming back Joel Embiid after two months of injury absence. The winning streak to end the regular season got some people back on the bandwagon, but overall that sense of wariness has hung around. There’s not a lot of excitement for the Sixers as a 7 seed, knowing that Embiid isn’t 100% and isn’t in 40+ minute shape. That’s why you’ve got season ticket holders deciding to cash in and non-STH avoiding the resale market. They just don’t believe in this team, and it’s hard to blame them.