Betabeat was working this morning and not looking for Knicks tickets on company time when we wandered over to SeatGeek, the hometown sports tickets aggregator, and typed in a search for NBA games. In the event you haven’t heard: NBA players and team owners recently announced a tentative agreement to restart the season on December 25 after a long contract negotiation stalemate ended. Imagine our surprise when we saw what appeared to be a normal season.
Thursday
Dec 15
7:00 PM
Philadelphia 76ers at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $67Saturday
Dec 17
7:30 PM
Los Angeles Clippers at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $155Sunday
Dec 18
6:00 PM
Los Angeles Lakers at New Jersey Nets
Prudential Center – Newark, NJ
tickets from $105Monday
Dec 19
7:30 PM
Memphis Grizzlies at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $92Wednesday
Dec 21
7:30 PM
Boston Celtics at New Jersey Nets
Prudential Center – Newark, NJ
tickets from $44Wednesday
Dec 21
7:30 PM
Utah Jazz at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $103Sunday
Dec 25
12:00 PM
Boston Celtics at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $200
Were SeatGeek’s site partners trying to con users into buying tickets for games that didn’t exist? We called up CEO Russell D’Souza.
“The NBA is going to release the schedule, but the deal has to get ratified first,” he said. “What we have now on our site is the old schedule. It’s possible a lot of those games will remain unchanged, but I would wait a day or two before buying tickets.”
But! Why are the games listed for sale at all? we wondered. We’d gotten all the way to a payment screen. These sites were trying to sell us nonexistent tickets!
“You’d get your money back,” Mr. D’Souza explained. “The policy that all our partners have is that if it’s canceled, you get a full refund. It was so unclear when the season was going to occur… but we should remove those events now, and in a couple days we’ll have the new NBA schedule.”
SeatGeek monitors tickets sites and pulls events into its system, aggregating and filtering tickets by price and comparing deals in order to come up with a Deal Score which lets you know how excited (geeked?) you should be about the price.
