Ticket sales on the secondary market for the Chicago Blackhawks, which made the Stanley Cup Finals over the weekend for the first time since 1992, are moving faster than team Captain Jonathan Toews on a breakaway.
The team has not won the Stanley Cup since 1961, currently the longest drought for teams that have been in the league for at least 40 years, and excited fans are searching high and low for tickets. Because the Montreal Canadiens vs. the Philadelphia Flyers Eastern Conference Finals series is still going on, the NHL has not yet released the schedule for the Stanley Cup Finals, but games could begin as early as Saturday, May 29.
Some brokers have seen premium Blackhawks Stanley Cup Finals tickets sell for $1,200 each, tickets that carry a face value price of $200. Upper level Blackhawks seats for the Finals are also selling for close to $1,000 each, despite the face value being $110.
“When you can pay $200 and turn around and get $1,100 or $1,200, that’s very good, but with the NHL a lot of it is luck,” said Jeff Greenberg, owner of ASC Ticket.
Christian Anderson, spokesperson for ticket search engine company FanSnap, said the prices for Blackhawks tickets remain high despite there being a lot of inventory to choose from.
The average price for Blackhawks tickets is $1,245 each; by contrast, the average price for tickets to see the Canadiens in the Finals is $1,524, but the team trails the Flyers in the best-of-seven series three-games-to-one. The average ticket price to see the Flyers in the Finals is $760, according to Anderson.
“We’re currently seeing nearly 7,000 ticket listings for the Hawks Stanley Cup Finals games. Fourteen sites currently have tickets for the Stanley Cup Finals,” he said.
On StubHub, the average price is down from the $1,200 range, but still robust, according to spokesperson Joellen Ferrer.
“We’ve seen high demand for Blackhawks tickets throughout the playoffs, and without question we’re seeing heightened activity for Stanley Cup tickets. Fans are paying $710 on average, which is indicative of the excitement, given that fans paid an average price just under $300 for the Conference Finals games against the Sharks,” she said.
As expected, Illinois buyers make up 75 percent of the buyers thus far for Stanley Cup tickets, according to Ferrer.
“This year’s NHL playoffs has been unlike any that we have seen in our company’s ten year history,” she said. “Historically, their playoff counterpart in the NBA yields much higher demand; however sales thus far illustrate that fans are fired up about hockey.”
