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A lot of us here at SeatGeek are math geeks (myself included). We share a unique passion for sports, music, and math. As strange as that may seem, we have found our groove analyzing ticket data for sports and concerts. We have been crunching a lot of numbers recently in an effort to present some interesting stats to our readers, but not all of it shows up here on the main Blog. If you like sports data make sure you are also subscribed to our Sports Blog, as some of our best posts are coming through that channel.  Here are a few of my recent favorites:

• Strasburg’s First Start and Average Ticket Listing Prices – a story which has been picked up by many major sources such as the Wall Street Journal
• The Stats Don’t Lie: Interleague Play Still Popular - a post in response to a recent radio discussion by Rob Neyer
• No-Hitters and Average Ticket Prices – this was posted in this blog, but cool enough to call-out again
• 5 Interesting Graphs for Baseball Fans – a report that is part of our ongoing TicketBeat series
• Backstreet Boys vs Justin Bieber: Average Ticket Listing Prices – Bieber might own Twitter, but Backstreet remains surprisingly close on average ticket prices

As much as we love math, we aren’t all business here. Much like Jack Bauer seems to go rogue every third season of 24, Justin – a member of our social media team – goes rogue with a rant more than we would like. Connect with him on the Sports Blog and Bleacher Report.

Looking for specific reports or analysis in the future? Comment your ideas below or email me at chad[at]seatgeek.com.

We’re sitting on a mountain of data at SeatGeek.  Every day, our platform gathers data about how the tickets for games and concerts are priced on the secondary market.  The primary purpose of this data is to help generate our forecasts, but, as a side effect, it lets us measure the whims of fans in a way no one else can.  Which NBA team is most exciting to watch?  Pundits can speculate all they like, but nothing captures true fan sentiment as well as their willingness to pay (we’ll be tacking the “exciting-ness” question in an upcoming blog post).

With the NBA season now past its midpoint, we decided to crunch NBA prices to determine which fans are overpaying for the on-court product and which were underpaying.

We wanted to figure out how much tickets for each team should cost if you considered only the performance of the team.  In other words, if you ignored the fact that the Knicks play in a city with a ton of fans, or the fact that the Celtics play in a city with a high cost of living, how much should tickets cost? 

Using our data and the magic of OLS regression (a statistical tool) we built a model that assigned a “theoretical” ticket price to each team based on the team’s on-court performance.  The model incorporated team’s record, playoff chances, winning streaks, and individual player performance, but it ignored all variables not related to on-court performance. We then compared these “theoretical” ticket prices to team’s actual average ticket prices.

It turns out that the New Orleans Hornets are the best deal in the NBA.  The Hornets are have a winning record and are in playoff contention, yet at $32/each their tickets are second-cheapest in the NBA (the Minnesota Timberwolves are cheapest).

On average, Hornets fans pay $37 less per ticket than fans in other cities pay to see teams of equal caliber.  The San Antonio Spurs and Milwaukee Bucks are the second and third best deals, respectively.  Spurs fans pay $29 less than their “theoretical” average price; Bucks fans pay $25 less.

On the other side of the coin, the LA Lakers are the NBA’s biggest rip off.  Yeah, sure, the Lakers are one of the league’s best teams, but their tickets sell for an astronomical average price of $144.  That’s $30 higher than the next-highest team (the Boston Celtics) and $79 more than the league average.  We found that the Celtics, Sacramento Kings, and Phoenix Suns are also terrible deals for fans.

External factors are no doubt at work here.  The Lakers are hot right now.  They are defending NBA champs.  They play in a huge, wealthy city.  They have a great global “brand” compared to most NBA teams.  So it isn’t shocking that fans are willing to pay a premium to see them.  But fans of other top teams (e.g. the Cleveland Cavs) get to see top-notch talent for substantially less money (in the case of the Cavs, $88.83 on average).

We notice a broader trend here, one that is unsurprising: fans in large, wealthy, metropolitan cities tend to pay more.  Fans in smaller, poor cities pay less to see teams of equal caliber.  I think (but haven’t yet had time to crunch all the data) that the difference in ticket prices between the rich/poor cities is greater than the difference between most goods in rich/poor cities.

Today we published our February edition of TicketPulse, a report that contains this data as well as some additional trends from the NBA.  Check out the full report here.