Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals

Well this explains a lot.

I recently bought NBA tickets to Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals (Oklahoma City Thunder vs. Golden State Warriors), and I was absolutely pissed off at the whole process.

I went on a small Twitter rampage to vent about it, with a picture that shows NO TICKETS available LITERALLY THE SECOND they went "on sale" (10AM Thursday May 19, 2016), and then beside it another screenshot of ALMOST 1,300 TICKETS FOR RESALE at the exact same time.

https://twitter.com/vlucas/status/733315798068953089

I learned the system was rigged against me the hard way, and it totally sucked. It was painfully obvious that all the tickets were sold out well before the game, and that a whole lot of scalpers were making lots of money on reselling tickets that were not fans, and never had any intention of going to the game in the first place. The kicker is that the system actually seemed designed intentionally for this to happen, screwing the actual fans in the process.

A more accurate title would be something like "Why you can't get good tickets for popular events via the official websites."

It feels like the ticketing process in general is broken. There's too much demand for events, making the entire market dysfunctional.

Why don't we 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable), 2) start pricing half the tickets as what the person will pay via auction and the other half as a fixed-price lottery? I'm not aware of many other ways to make things fair when demand outstrips supply so much.

Unrelated: Can't tell how I feel about Medium.com as a CMS compared to old Grantland. Reads great, but feels like standalone (could just be me.)