Hoops

Ticket sales for game 1 Hisense Arena?

Yes, is now. When I wrote that there was more. The 30 minutes they were snapped up in is testament to Adelaide's sales.

AFAIK, there are only about 20 single seats left for Sunday's game?

Not to defend Melbourne's atrocious ticket sales, but Adelaide's game isn't sold out. The tickets held aside for Melbourne fans were released last night and some are still available.

Don't underestimate the impact of the VJBL being played on Friday. It is Round 1 for the majority of teams!

Extremely sad and disgraceful for what they call themselves 'The Sporting Capital of Australia' with a population of 5.8 million and with one pro basketball team, what can one say... SA, 1.6 million and geographically much larger than Victoria, game sells out in under 3 days and looking at the same number of around 8000 people.

Yeah it is tough to schedule.

At the end of the day United had to have game 1. Unless LK wanted to pull rank and switch to it AHHAH. Which wouldn't happen.

So perhaps monumental "stuff up" was a bit harsh. It's more just disappointing.

United have also managed to schedule VJBL games at Hisense throughout the week, freeing those families to attend the grand final. They're clearly aware of the situation and working with it as best they can.

They had to play G1 & G3 on Fridays. Saturday this time of year has every league playing which means all Fox channels are full on Sat night. That's why Utd's SF G1 was on Fox Sports News as there was no room but due to stadium availability had to play on a Saturday.

Of course Utd wanted to not play on Fridays during VJBL but had no choice.

I do think there will be at least 9,000 people there tomorrow night though.

You can see on Ticketek that they've opened up the top section. And the rest- the parts that were open for Semi Game 1, are basically sold out- only individual seats available.

Prices are a bit high though.

For a Bronze seat- nosebleed on the baselines, you're talking $51.

For people with a mortgage, kids and all the rest of it, that's a big outlay.

You could spend $40 on a pub meal and a couple of beers, and watch it on a big screen.

I wonder what percentage of attendees at the average United game have VJBL commitments of some sort on a Friday night.

It wouldn't be huge, but it wouldn't be negligible either.

And the thing is, it's a huge missed opportunity. This is your target market. They're a captive audience- they're in basketball stadiums regularly. So what do you do? You put up your Melbourne United posters. You run school holiday programs. You offer discounted memberships to the association.

United has been doing all the right things....and now this. BOTH games 1 AND 3 on a Friday. It is a monumental stuff up that really takes the shine off so much of the good work they've done for the past 4 years.

This was the whole point of switching from the Tigers! The was a huge part of the rationale- that those from the burbs, those connected with either defunct NBL clubs or opposing VJBL clubs or both, wouldn't support the Tigers. And now they aren't being given the opportunity to support United either.

I understand theres a big issue with clashing with VJBL, however its a frigging grand final. Anything less than 7000 people there and Melbourne should hand back its 'sporting capital of the world' brag.

What about all the other people of Melbourne who dont have junior basketball obligations? Not interested? Melbourne's first NBL grand final appearance since 2009. This is a joke if its not over 7000.

LOL yeah I just got an SMS "Melbourne, we need you"

So that 10K was creative accounting over their first two games in the series, LOL.

It's obviously not sold out tomorrow.

I just got a text message encouraging me to buy tickets. Which I already have...

Lasttix?

Hahahaha are Melbourne doing their creative accounting with ticket sales as they used to do with memberships?

Makes sense.

It was 10,000 tickets across the 2 games.. since you could purchase then together

They haven't opened up the full arena yet so I'd say around 7k at the moment.

Yes, what they said on Fox.

Sounds like hyped BS doesn't it?

It didn't sound right.

10K already on Friday apparently.