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Knicks fever is once again gripping the New York area, and the latest fervor is pushing tickets toward Super Bowl-level pricing.
The Knicks will face the Cavaliers in the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals, with Game 1 set for Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. Though the Knicks advanced to the conference final last year, and also made a run to the second round of the playoffs in 2024, this current squad is widely seen as far stronger.
New York just swept the 76ers in the conference semifinals, winning two of the four games by more than 30 points. That followed a six-game series win over the Hawks in the first round, capped by a blowout road victory in Atlanta by 51 points, and the Knicks are currently favored to win the upcoming series against Cleveland.
As a result, Knicks tickets are going for sharply elevated prices across the ticket resale market. The team notified season-ticket holders over the weekend about ticket availability for potential NBA Finals games at MSG. That step, along with the team’s continued playoff march, has pushed resale pricing for any of four potential Finals games at MSG to begin at about $2,500 per ticket on multiple marketplaces.
That get-in price is starting to approach the roughly $3,800 entry-level figure on the resale markets for February’s Super Bowl LX, and is essentially on par with Super Bowl LIX early last year in New Orleans. Further ticket price increases are expected during the course of the conference finals against the Cavaliers. High-end pricing, meanwhile, already shows the initial resale asks for NBA Finals seats at MSG soaring well into five figures.
The secondary market for the upcoming conference finals against the Cavaliers, meanwhile, begins at about $500 per seat and quickly escalates from there.
For conference finals games in Cleveland at Rocket Arena, the Cavaliers are limiting primary-market purchases to fans with billing addresses “in select areas of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York”—essentially representing the Cleveland area in Northeast Ohio and extreme western portions of Pennsylvania and New York. The secondary market, however, works around much of that, and high-income Knicks fans are still expected to show en masse for the games in Cleveland. That’s particularly true given resale prices for those contests are currently about half the level of those for the New York-based games.
The winner of the Eastern Conference finals will advance to the NBA Finals and face the winner of the Spurs-Thunder clash in the Western Conference finals.
Spinning Into Place
MSG Sports Corp., the Knicks’ parent company, also made progress on Monday toward a potential spin-off of its Knicks business from that of the NHL’s Rangers, also currently held within that larger corporation.
The spin-off was first proposed in February, and MSG Sports said it filed a confidential initial Form 10 registration statement with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. That statement marks an important procedural step toward completing the split, though the potential transaction still requires several approvals.
MSG Sports said the move would “enable shareholders to more clearly evaluate each company’s assets and growth prospects, while providing both with enhanced strategic and financial flexibility.”
Continued progress on the spin-off comes nearly a year after activist investor Boyar Value Group pressured MSG Sports to do this, arguing that the full value of the Knicks was particularly trapped in the current corporate structure. The Knicks’ estimated value of $9.75 billion by itself is more than the current MSG Sports market capitalization of about $8.6 billion, while NHL franchise values also have surged in recent years.
The minor-league franchises for each team owned by MSG Sports—the G League’s Westchester Knicks and American Hockey League’s Hartford Wolf Pack—would go with their respective parent team in the split.
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