By Mark Kreidler -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, May 29, 2005
There's something interesting and potentially franchise-shaping occurring just below the surface in Kingsland, and, in other news, I can't prove it.
I cannot prove it factually, that is - or at least as close as the Kings allow any business facts to emerge. On the surface, after all, the perennial ticket push looks healthy: The club has sold out 288 straight games at Arco Arena, and the team says the renewal rate for season tickets has hovered in the 90-plus percent range for five years.
That's an impressive performance for any pro franchise (or for any fan base, depending upon one's perspective). It is also impossible to verify, seeing as how the Kings steadfastly - and oh so cheerfully - refused last week to provide even one actual sales figure to back up their claims on the renewal rates and wouldn't allow their ticket-services director to be interviewed.
But there is another story working now, the one just below the surface. It has to do with fans on the verge of bailing out. It has to do with fans who find themselves, finally, after all these years, right at the point of being priced out of their own seats.
It has to do with fans - die-hards, loyalists - who suddenly, in the words of 20-year ticket-holder Jerry Balshor, "realize that this is causing us for the first time to be businessmen about the Kings. It's causing us to say, 'Is this really the right use of that much money?' "
It won't be the death of the franchise, no.
But it might just be the end of the romance.
You wonder why the Kings' owners would go off in pursuit of a name brand like Phil Jackson? Maybe they sense the conflicted nature of their ticket base. By the start of next season (if there is one), the average price of a ticket to a Kings home game will have risen 41 percent since 2001 - and that's the overall average. As you get closer to the floor, away from the cheapie nosebleed seats, that percentage rises dramatically.
Over many of those years, the ticket buyers enjoyed high-quality, high-profile, playoff-intensive basketball. But everything that rises must converge. Here, today, the Kings are a mid-pack, first-round exit of a reloading team with no superstar and no galvanizing force.
Is that worth $12,000 a year to see? That's what two seats in Balshor's part of Section 120 go for - $140 per seat, per game, plus parking, and heaven forbid you should want anything to eat or drink. Sit down, shut up and clap.
"Who they're forcing out is the average Joe Basketball guy," said Balshor, who is still hot from having his four season seats moved - without prior notice, he says - from the aisle to the middle of a row on Opening Night a few seasons ago. "A lot of us are debating whether to go on with our tickets, because they cost so much."
Balshor used to attend 35 to 40 games a season; now he sees maybe five games, splitting the rest of his tickets among eight or nine other buyers. His experience closely tracks that of so many others I've heard from over the past several months, folks who have seen lower-level tickets go from $40 or $50 per game when they first jumped in to $115 or $140 or $165 next season.
Arco sounds a little quieter to you these days? Listen, it isn't just because Chris Webber left the building. The residual effect of seasons of die-hards slowly selling off their increasingly pricey tickets to make the payments is a less-connected fan base - better than most fan bases, unquestionably, but less connected all the same.
And this is no idle carping; this is the lifeblood of the franchise. The Kings operate in a modest TV market with modest corporate money traipsing through their luxury suites. The Maloofs, by necessity, have built the modern success of the team on the backs of the ticket buyers and through their own deep pockets.
Now their business model calls for a new arena, with nicer everything, more luxury suites and, quite obviously, higher ticket prices. It's ironic that this is occurring at precisely the time that so many of their longtime supporters, financial and spiritual, are pondering backing away - one seat at a time.
High ticket prices at pro sporting events, of course, do not qualify as breaking news. What's interesting here is the Anecdotal Effect, for lack of a better term. The Kings have been jacking prices for years, but I've heard more broad complaints - and more sad laments - from the fans over the past six months than I heard in six years before then.
It includes the top spenders, too. It includes the people sitting courtside, the seats whose prices you never hear advertised because they go to such a select group. But what a blood-giving sort of group it is; certain courtside seats under the northern basket have risen from about $500 five years ago to $965 - or, for those like me who can't conceive of such things, roughly a $40,000 annual price hike, a 93 percent increase, for two season passes.
Some of those ticket holders, despite their relative financial health, are now asking what they get for their money. It's the kind of question that took years to be reflexively asked around Arco Arena. And that is a new and complicated dynamic for an ownership group that, amid its myriad other concerns about the franchise, has never had to count a balky fan base among them. Joe Maloof once told me he knew there was a ceiling on ticket prices in a market like Sacramento; he just didn't know what it was. I have a feeling, listening to the voices out there, that he's about to find out.
About the writer:Reach Mark Kreidler at (916) 321-1149 or mkreidler@sacbee.com.
http://www.sacbee.com/content/sports/story/12974800p-13821801c.html
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, May 29, 2005
There's something interesting and potentially franchise-shaping occurring just below the surface in Kingsland, and, in other news, I can't prove it.
I cannot prove it factually, that is - or at least as close as the Kings allow any business facts to emerge. On the surface, after all, the perennial ticket push looks healthy: The club has sold out 288 straight games at Arco Arena, and the team says the renewal rate for season tickets has hovered in the 90-plus percent range for five years.
That's an impressive performance for any pro franchise (or for any fan base, depending upon one's perspective). It is also impossible to verify, seeing as how the Kings steadfastly - and oh so cheerfully - refused last week to provide even one actual sales figure to back up their claims on the renewal rates and wouldn't allow their ticket-services director to be interviewed.
But there is another story working now, the one just below the surface. It has to do with fans on the verge of bailing out. It has to do with fans who find themselves, finally, after all these years, right at the point of being priced out of their own seats.
It has to do with fans - die-hards, loyalists - who suddenly, in the words of 20-year ticket-holder Jerry Balshor, "realize that this is causing us for the first time to be businessmen about the Kings. It's causing us to say, 'Is this really the right use of that much money?' "
It won't be the death of the franchise, no.
But it might just be the end of the romance.
You wonder why the Kings' owners would go off in pursuit of a name brand like Phil Jackson? Maybe they sense the conflicted nature of their ticket base. By the start of next season (if there is one), the average price of a ticket to a Kings home game will have risen 41 percent since 2001 - and that's the overall average. As you get closer to the floor, away from the cheapie nosebleed seats, that percentage rises dramatically.
Over many of those years, the ticket buyers enjoyed high-quality, high-profile, playoff-intensive basketball. But everything that rises must converge. Here, today, the Kings are a mid-pack, first-round exit of a reloading team with no superstar and no galvanizing force.
Is that worth $12,000 a year to see? That's what two seats in Balshor's part of Section 120 go for - $140 per seat, per game, plus parking, and heaven forbid you should want anything to eat or drink. Sit down, shut up and clap.
"Who they're forcing out is the average Joe Basketball guy," said Balshor, who is still hot from having his four season seats moved - without prior notice, he says - from the aisle to the middle of a row on Opening Night a few seasons ago. "A lot of us are debating whether to go on with our tickets, because they cost so much."
Balshor used to attend 35 to 40 games a season; now he sees maybe five games, splitting the rest of his tickets among eight or nine other buyers. His experience closely tracks that of so many others I've heard from over the past several months, folks who have seen lower-level tickets go from $40 or $50 per game when they first jumped in to $115 or $140 or $165 next season.
Arco sounds a little quieter to you these days? Listen, it isn't just because Chris Webber left the building. The residual effect of seasons of die-hards slowly selling off their increasingly pricey tickets to make the payments is a less-connected fan base - better than most fan bases, unquestionably, but less connected all the same.
And this is no idle carping; this is the lifeblood of the franchise. The Kings operate in a modest TV market with modest corporate money traipsing through their luxury suites. The Maloofs, by necessity, have built the modern success of the team on the backs of the ticket buyers and through their own deep pockets.
Now their business model calls for a new arena, with nicer everything, more luxury suites and, quite obviously, higher ticket prices. It's ironic that this is occurring at precisely the time that so many of their longtime supporters, financial and spiritual, are pondering backing away - one seat at a time.
High ticket prices at pro sporting events, of course, do not qualify as breaking news. What's interesting here is the Anecdotal Effect, for lack of a better term. The Kings have been jacking prices for years, but I've heard more broad complaints - and more sad laments - from the fans over the past six months than I heard in six years before then.
It includes the top spenders, too. It includes the people sitting courtside, the seats whose prices you never hear advertised because they go to such a select group. But what a blood-giving sort of group it is; certain courtside seats under the northern basket have risen from about $500 five years ago to $965 - or, for those like me who can't conceive of such things, roughly a $40,000 annual price hike, a 93 percent increase, for two season passes.
Some of those ticket holders, despite their relative financial health, are now asking what they get for their money. It's the kind of question that took years to be reflexively asked around Arco Arena. And that is a new and complicated dynamic for an ownership group that, amid its myriad other concerns about the franchise, has never had to count a balky fan base among them. Joe Maloof once told me he knew there was a ceiling on ticket prices in a market like Sacramento; he just didn't know what it was. I have a feeling, listening to the voices out there, that he's about to find out.
About the writer:Reach Mark Kreidler at (916) 321-1149 or mkreidler@sacbee.com.
http://www.sacbee.com/content/sports/story/12974800p-13821801c.html
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