$133,000 tickets: Somebody paid a lot of money for courtside seats.
In the hopes of watching the Warriors become the first Bay Area team since the 1974 A’s to win a championship at its home venue, someone was willing to pay record prices for courtside seats.
A person doled out $133,000, including fees, for two floor tickets to Game 5 of the NBA Finals at Oracle Arena on Monday, according to ESPN’s Darren Rovell. The buyer paid more than $17,000 in fees alone to purchase the seats on Golden State’s Ticketmaster resale site.
Some courtside seats for the Finals had a face value of $3,000, and the average resale price on the team site for Game 5 was $1,731, per Rovell. That was nearly 20 percent more than last year’s Game 5, when Draymond Green was suspended and the Warriors fell 112-97 to Cleveland.
This record-setting, $133,000 purchase came a day after news surfaced that someone had bought two floor tickets for $90,000 ($45,000 apiece) at Ticketmaster. A fan paid $99,000 last year on StubHub for two courtside tickets to Game 7.
McGee movie: The Warriors needed no added incentive to beat the Cavs in Game 5, but it sure didn’t hurt that wrapping up the NBA Finals will free up their summer-vacation schedule.
For one player, that means one extra-special date: the Thursday premiere of a movie he has helped fund.
JaVale McGee is an investor in the Tupac Shakur biopic, “All Eyez on Me.” He’s a friend of the producer, L.T. Hutton, who showed McGee the script two years ago.
“I’ve always been into producing stuff,” McGee told the Undefeated. “I got put into a position where I was able to be more of a monetary producer in the Tupac movie. So I jumped at the chance, especially after I saw the movie. It’s a great movie.”
The biopic follows the rapper’s life and rise to fame and stars Demetrius Shipp Jr. as Tupac and Danai Gurira (“The Walking Dead”) as his mother, Afeni Shakur. Afeni Shakur was a longtime Marin County resident; Tupac attended Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley.
“The actor that played Tupac is amazing,” McGee told the Undefeated. “He really looks like Tupac. All the scenes are really well set up. His mother really looks like his mother. The casting was really good, from my standpoint. I think the public is going to love it, especially since they have the rights to the music.”