Toronto Maple Leafs release more tickets, drop prices ahead of tonight's 1st home playoff game
Leafs using 'dynamic pricing' to lower ticket prices to lure in more fans
Fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs looking for tickets to tonight's first home playoff game could be in luck after all.
Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) has released an additional 336 tickets for Game 3 at the Air Canada Centre, after initially posting only 96 early last week, when it first opened the online box office to the general public.
A CBC/Toronto Star investigation has been chronicling scarcity and prices in the ticket industry, including the revelation that 90 per cent of the 18,201 arena seats in the Air Canada Centre are controlled by season ticket holders.
MLSE has identified thousands of tickets for both the Leafs and the Raptors that are controlled and resold by scalpers and professional brokers.
However, instead of cancelling those tickets (as would other teams, such as the Winnipeg Jets), MLSE is charging them a 30 per cent premium to renew their season seats for next year.
Poor playoff start leading to a price drop?
CBC News has asked both Ticketmaster and MLSE where the additional tickets for tonight's game (a 7 p.m. ET start) have come from, and why the prices have dropped so dramatically from what fans were paying just a few days ago.
Ticketmaster said it sells but doesn't own the tickets, and referred questions to MLSE. MLSE declined to comment.
The Leafs dropped Games 1 and 2 of their seven-game series against the Boston Bruins by a combined score of 12-4.
Prices are now dropping.
A single Gold ticket in Section 101, Row 10 was posted for sale on Ticketmaster at $646 on Tuesday.
But after the Leafs lost their second road game in Boston, that ticket dropped to $528 over the weekend.
Since then, the ticket price has gone down again, to $350, and then to $250 earlier today.
It's the same with a pair of Reds in Section 112 that have dropped from $513 per ticket to $440.
| Ticketmaster primary box office | Number of distinct tickets available |
| Pre-sale for season ticket holders | 654 |
| Pre-sale for Leafs Nation members | 209 |
| General public sale | 432 |
(Source: CBC/Toronto Star analysis, April 2018)