Do you think Donald Trump is going to the Knicks game to buy tickets this time?

A single NBA Finals ticket costs up to $142k, with courtside seats over $70k, and the cheapest edge seats starting at $15k. If the Knicks host four games, the total box office revenue from official tickets alone would reach $580 million—about 4.2 billion RMB.
In comparison, the total box office for a whole year of Chinese Super League matches is only 580 million RMB.
Even more exaggerated is the scalper market: tickets have been resold for as high as $500k each, and tickets for the best seats in the Finals are said to have reached $2 million, roughly the price of a house in Beijing or Shanghai.
Not all of this money goes to the home team. The Knicks can only keep about 30%—45% is paid to the league, and 25% is split with the visiting Spurs. But no matter how it’s divided, the numbers are astonishing.
Interestingly, reselling tickets in the U.S. is legal. Some jokingly call it a “wealth redistribution” mechanism: the poor and the rich both enter a lottery, and if the poor win, they resell the tickets to the rich, making several tens of thousands of dollars to improve their lives.
Tickets are consumables; once watched, they’re gone, and they don’t cause side effects.
Ultimately, it’s not that tickets are expensive, but that New York is too wealthy. The most expensive World Cup tickets are $33k, which is considered sky-high by other countries’ standards. In the U.S., that’s only a quarter of the most expensive NBA Finals tickets.
The gap between ordinary people and super-rich is clearly visible from a single ticket.