Blazers Tickets Not Quite As Hot

As single-game tickets go on sale next week, Portland Trail Blazers brass promise an improved team that fans can take pride in.

But don't expect seats to disappear as in the days when Rip City and Scottie Pippen routinely sold out the house. With No. 1 draft pick Greg Oden lost to season-ending knee surgery, fans should find decent seats available at the box office before most games, industry analysts say. In some cases, prices will be cheaper than last year.

"If Greg Oden was around, there would be scant single-game seats left," said Jon Greenberg, executive editor of Team Marketing Report Inc., a Chicago-based sports-marketing trade publication. "You're going to see a big loss of people coming to the game just to see what Oden was about. He was a player who had the potential to be an event player. There was a reason to go there just to say you saw Greg Oden play."

Although the Blazers no longer can expect to be one of the hottest tickets in the NBA, they still have a vastly expanded season-ticket base and expect to outdraw last season. The team acknowledges that it probably will offer new ticket packages in midseason -- a common practice in the NBA -- but fans shouldn't expect deep discounts for good seats.

"There's going to be a scarcity this market hasn't seen (in a while)," Trail Blazers chief operations officer Mike Golub said this week.

Team officials say they're excited about Portland 's fan allure, particularly compared with two seasons ago, when a dismal record and offcourt woes left its average attendance in the league cellar at 15,049 a game, with no sellouts.

Last season, average attendance jumped to 16,360 a game -- 22nd in the 30-team NBA -- with five of eight sellouts coming in the last 18 games, Golub said. Portland joined Orlando and the Los Angeles Clippers in logging attendance increases of between 7 percent and 10 percent.

Without disclosing recent ticket-sales figures, the Blazers say the franchise now has twice as many season-ticket holders and nearly triple the number of deposits for group seats, and they expect twice as many sellouts as last season.

Ultimately, experts say, the team's performance on and off the court will determine whether the franchise is prompted to offer last-minute price discounts, as it did for some games in recent years.

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