Madison Square Garden's capacity will shrink a bit this season.

I'm rather accustomed to describing the Madison Square Garden crowd as "20,000 people", or perhaps "Twenty thousand people", or sometimes "20,000 beer-leaden savages, give or take a few sleeping, beer-leaden children". The real MSG capacity is 19,763, though most of us round up because it sounds cooler. However, as Marc Berman reports, that number is set to drop pretty significantly this coming season:

With the second stage of the Garden transformation nearly complete, the Garden capacity will fall about 1,000 lower than the usual 19,763 sell-out crowd, according to team officials. The Knicks enter the 2012-13 season with a 68-game home sell-out streak.

The second stage of the renovation featured a complete overhaul of the upper bowl. The final stage of the transformation next summer will restore the seating capacity to normal levels when the much-hyped glass bridge is built across the upper tier from one side of the Garden to the other. The bridge will also contain seats.

Yeah, not only is that SKYBRIDGE still happening (And it sounds treacherous to me. Just asking for trouble.), but they're somehow going to cram a thousand seats on to it. Anything to get back up to that 20,000-ish mark, I say. If the bridge seats don't work out, just make the court transparent and let people spectate from below.

Meanwhile, though there are fewer seats in the new upper bowl, those seats have better view of the court (they say) and they're back to being the famous shade of blue they were until 1990.

Cool. I expect detailed reports from the first of us to get to the Garden this season.