Scalpers, beware, the Boston Bruins will not tolerate you any longer.

The Bruins are fighting back agains resellers by canceling the accounts of people presumed to be buying season tickets in bulk and charging over face value on the resale market and imposing a substantial premium on resellers.

Via the Boston Globe:

The team announced Monday that it has canceled the accounts of nearly 200 high-volume ticket resellers located outside New England and New York, after identifying them in an analysis of its sales data. The 1,000 season tickets freed up by the move will go to some of the 10,000 fans on a waiting list for season tickets, Bruins executives said.

High-volume ticket resellers within the local market, meanwhile, will now have to pay more for season tickets than fans do — a premium of nine percent or higher, depending on the location of the seats within TD Garden. Regular-season ticket holders will not see an increase in prices for the 2016 – 2017 National Hockey League season, the Bruins said.

“We wanted to better understand the mix of our entire season-ticket population, and we discovered we had a higher than projected number of resellers,” said Glen Thornborough, senior vice president of sales and marketing for the Bruins and TD Garden, in an interview. “The idea was finding a way to increase the number of tickets for individuals that use the tickets for personal use, and allow more fans to come in at the discounted prices season ticket holders get.”

Nearby, the Red Sox have attempted to solve the resale problem by creating their own secondary market on which fans can swap tickets on the team’s watch.

It certainly makes sense for the Bruins to want to gets season tickets into the hands of actual fans, not entrepreneurs manipulating the system for profit. This crackdown will, however, presumably decrease the supply of tickets on the resale market, which means ticket prices on secondary markets like StubHub could actually increase.

The whole thing kind of evokes the fascinating Grantland story from last year about the Boston cops (and the Red Sox) chasing around a gang of knucklehead t-shirt vendors who were stepping on the toes of the actual licensed merchandisers. Whether out of the good of their hearts or, more likely, their own financial interests, sports teams in Boston and otherwise are going to do all they can to make sure you’re buying your tickets/memorabilia/food/beer/etc. from them and no one else.

 

 

About Alex Putterman

Alex is a writer and editor for The Comeback and Awful Announcing. He has written for The Atlantic, VICE Sports, MLB.com, SI.com and more. He is a proud alum of Northwestern University and The Daily Northwestern. You can find him on Twitter @AlexPutterman.