How much are Knicks fans willing to pay for first-round playoff tickets?

The Knicks have officially put tickets on sale for their first round matchup against the Atlanta Hawks, but you better move quickly on Ticketmaster unless you want to be one of the jabronies putting up hundreds of dollars for seats five miles from the court.

Seriously, go right now if you want to try and get tickets for face value. They are selling like face masks in 2020. At the moment, the cheapest ticket on Ticketmaster for any of the games is $200, and for the most part, only single seats are available. By the time this post gets published, there could very well be no face value tickets remaining.

So maybe you missed out and need to head to the secondary market for tickets. How much will that run you? Two arms and two legs? On Monday, before tickets were on sale, SNY put out a story noting that a seat in section 214 in the 16th row was listed at $968 on SeatGeek, and that’s not even including fees.

Except, again, that was before tickets were on sale. So who the heck was listing tickets on SeatGeek, and how? As of 4 pm today, Wednesday, May 19, the cheapest ticket available on SeatGeek was $204, in section 414, row 3. The most expensive ticket? A VIP courtside seat listed at $29,799. Hefty, but hey; if the Knicks go on another multi-year playoff drought, you might think that was almost $30,000 well spent. The prices are similar on StubHub, where the cheapest ticket is currently in section 400, and would cost you $218, before fees.

You may be asking yourself whether it would be cheaper to fly or drive to Atlanta and catch one of New York’s road games. It depends on how cheap a flight you can snag. The cheapest ticket for one of the games taking place at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta is $109 on StubHub at the moment. Which is definitely cheaper than MSG, but don’t forget you’d have to pay for travel, and presumably a hotel. Although it’s certainly warm enough in Atlanta that you could survive the night sleeping outside if you want to save a little coin.

Finally, are the Knicks a hotter ticket than the Brooklyn Nets? Ticketmaster seems to be priced pretty similarly, but on the secondary market it’s a different story. You could buy a ticket in Section 218 at the Barclays Center for as low as $130 on SeatGeek. On StubHub, there’s at least one ticket for game two listed at $117. So to answer the question stated at the start of this paragraph, yes, the Knicks are the hottest ticket in town, despite Brooklyn’s star power.

The Knicks intend to allow 13,000 fans into Madison Square Garden for each game, and the team is expecting a mixture of both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. There will be designated sections for fully vaccinated people, and in order to qualify you need to have gotten your final vaccination dose at least 14 days before the event. Masks won’t be necessary when you’re in your seat, but do MSG a favor and wear the mask if you’re walking around the arena. No one wants some silly mask-related confrontation to show up on social media; we’re trying to root for the Knicks in the playoffs. You can find all the information you ever wanted about attending a Knicks game on the MSG website right here.