The upcoming U.S.-Canada final of the 4 Nations Face-Off is not the Super Bowl of hockey. The runaway success of the upstart tournament, however, is prompting ticket demand that is now approaching the NFL’s title game.
Thursday’s final in Boston of the NHL midseason event is sparking low-end, get-in pricing of nearly $1,000 per ticket on multiple resale marketplaces. That figure is easily the highest for any NHL event since last June’s Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final between the Panthers and Oilers. Prime lower-level seats at TD Garden, the site of the game, are routinely garnering more than $3,000 each. Minimum pricing for the game has also roughly quadrupled over the last 10 days as the U.S.-Canada matchup became more likely, and then confirmed.
Those hockey ticket figures are not far from some of the final resale pricing for the recent Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, which, due in part to a historic lodging crunch there, ultimately saw get-in costs fall below $2,000 per ticket and some lower-level seats drop below $4,000. The Super Bowl, however, was played in a facility with roughly four times the seating capacity as TD Garden’s hockey capacity of 17,850.
A prior game between the U.S. and Canada in the 4 Nations Face-Off drew an average of 4.4 million American viewers, the NHL’s largest audience outside of the Stanley Cup Final since 2019, and even greater viewership is expected Thursday.
Powerful Mix
The event represents a potent combination of factors that have allowed the tournament to transcend any prior NHL All-Star Game, or even a retooled NBA All-Star Game this weekend.
The U.S.-Canada matchup on the ice, of course, revives many prior ones in the Olympics between the two countries—perhaps most notably the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver that featured an overtime golden goal for Canada from Penguins star Sidney Crosby.
Current geopolitics, meanwhile, have sharply escalated the tension between the countries—a situation filtering its way back to sports. U.S. President Donald Trump has spoken repeatedly of making Canada the 51st American state—an idea sharply rebuked by many Canadians including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
That idea from Trump has sparked widespread boos of the U.S. national anthem by Canadians during the 4 Nations Face-Off games in Canada. Such boos have also been increasingly common in regular-season NHL games amid an additional tariff battle.
