We were a little surprised the other day that the Heat did not sell out the building in Philadelphia (although it looked pretty close), but this one is a bit of a shocker:
There are still tickets available for the Heat home opener Friday, something first made public by a tweet from Brian Windhorst of ESPN. We checked by trying to buy tickets online and yup, you can still get them.
There were not a lot, just a few hundred. But spread throughout the arenas. And those could be seats the Heat held back to use in promotional events or to give out to sponsors and the like, then when they were not needed they were released to the public. (That is a pretty common practice.)
Still, that you can still buy tickets to the Heat opener last minute without having to go through a broker is a bit shocking. This for a game of real importance against the Magic (well, as much real importance as any game in October can have).
Bigger yet, you can still get tickets for the game when the Lakers come to town. That is not sold out.
As we said about Philadelphia, this speaks more to the economy and the price of tickets than it does the popularity of the Heat. In these times, even in Miami, people have limited discretionary income and what are they going to spend it on: A Heat ticket or a night at a hot South Beach club and some Cristal? In Boston the fans don’t have these problems (and if you ordered Cristal at The Corrib Pub what would happen to you anyway?).
