I’ve been Chucked!

New Jersey residents should be embarrassed. (In specific, not just in general.)

It’s Friday at 5:00 p.m., and Ticketmaster still has pairs of tickets for tonight’s NBA playoff game between the Toronto Raptors and the New Jersey Nets. The game is less than two hours away, but you can walk right up and buy tickets for $76. Ridiculous. You don’t deserve a playoff team, and soon you won’t have a team at all.

Contrast that to Toronto: There are no pairs of tickets left for the next game here, and there are only a smattering of single seats - $281 for Side Prime, and one courtside seat for $800. You might be able to buy them on eBay, where prices start around $150, or $400 for the lower bowl.

Of course, everybody knows you can’t buy any Leafs ticket without selling your firstborn to the mob. Even soccer is selling like hotcakes: they haven’t even played a home game yet, but all 14,000 season ticket packages for Toronto FC (0-3 so far) are already sold out!

Shame on you, Nets fans.

And a very un-Canadian gesture goes out to Richard Jefferson, who cracked a joke about Toronto fans supporting the Nets: in Game One, all 20,000 of us wore red shirts to support the Raptors, but the Nets decided to wear their alternate red jerseys.

Which leads to my suggestion for a Nets promotion, which I e-mailed to Raptors play-by-play man Chuck Swirsky. Chuck printed it in his Chuck Checks In blog today, as the first item in the Mailbag:

To the Mailbag!

Emailer Paul, Toronto: Hey Chuck, I’ve got a suggestion for Richard Jefferson and all those who doubted the red-clad fans that rocked the ACC over the past two games: Perhaps the Meadowlands can have a similar promotion… all the fans can dress up as empty seats!

(PG: Hat tip to Casper, who came up with this joke when we were at Game #2.)

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 04-27-2007 | 05:04 PM
Posted in: Sports