It’s been eight years since the Vancouver Canucks played a playoff game in front of a home crowd.
The club has now clinched a spot in the 2024 post-season, and nowhere is the fan excitement quite as palpable as at the box office.
Playoff tickets went on sale to the general public Monday morning, and prices have already begun to shoot through the roof.
“I am looking at the resale and I can’t believe it. There’s absolutely no tickets left of the regular-selling tickets, it’s all resale,” said Kingsley Bailey, manager of Vancouver Ticket Service.
“The prices are starting at the about $400 range, and I am going wow, that’s a lot of money.”
Fans were met with a virtual queue of thousands Monday morning as they logged in in search of tickets, the cheapest of which was selling in the range of $250.
Those were snapped up quickly and by Monday afternoon seats were only available via verified resale, ranging between $405 and $1,845.
“They haven’t made the playoffs since before I was in high school, and I am a grown adult now,” said Canucks superfan Marcus Keller, who operates the TikTok account @Canucksvideos.
“I think a lot of Canucks fans are feeling the same thing, there’s a whole generation of fans who haven’t seen them in the playoffs before.”
The Canucks did play in the 2020 playoffs, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic all games were played away from fans in a so-called “bubble.”
Keller was able to score a few seats in the nosebleeds for about $200 thanks to season ticket holder presales.
But he said his dreams of taking a squad of friends to playoff games will likely be on hold this year.
“Once they saw the prices, a lot of them just said, ‘Hey, we’re students,’ or ‘We have to pay our rent, and we just can’t afford to do this right now no matter how much we want to go,'” he said.
While prices surged early, Bailey said he believes they may actually come down in the days to come, as the market settles out and closes the gap between what sellers are asking and what buyers are actually willing to pay.
“There will be a correction, this price is too high,” he predicted.
“This is only the first round. The deeper they get the more it’s going to be, and this is way out of line.”