It appears that Los Angeles Lakers fans still really love former star guard Kobe Bryant. The team is going to retire his #8 and #24 jerseys on Kobe Bryant Night Monday against the Golden State Warriors, and the ticket prices are remarkable. In fact, Dime Magazine’s Ryan Nagelhout writes that they’re the most expensive regular-season NBA tickets since the last major event around Bryant, his April 2016 final game.
Already a major attraction with Steph Curry and the Warriors in town, a chance to honor a Lakers legend is a chance for scalpers to make some sweet, sweet cash off the event. The secondary market for the Bryant retirement game is pretty insane, to the tune of $1,477 per seat on average. That’s more than any NBA regular season ticket of the past two years, according to ticket reseller Ticket IQ.
The last ticket that cost more was actually Bryant’s last game, which cost an average of more than $2,000 each.
And nothing else comes particularly close. A Ticket IQ graphic shows that while the Warriors have been involved in all five of the most expensive games over the past two seasons, the prices usually haven’t risen to the level of this one:
But, as our Matt Clapp wrote at the time, the prices for Bryant’s final game (at home against the Utah Jazz) were even more nuts, with the cheapest possible tickets going for $695, most lower bowl tickets going for $3,000 – $7,000 and some of the best tickets going for upwards of $12,000.
So there’s a whole lot of interest in Kobe. And it’s pretty amazing that just his jersey retirement (granted, against the Warriors, but still) has managed to beat out every regular-season NBA game since the last time he played.
