How much would you pay to witness hockey history?
That's the question being asked by many Winnipeg Jets fans that didn't secure a ticket to the franchise's first regular-season game after relocating from Atlanta, scheduled for Sunday evening against the Montreal Canadiens at MTS Centre. The atmosphere will be incomparable; the sense of fulfillment and community undeniable. It's a ticket you frame and then bequeath to subsequent generations in your last will.
Please recall that season tickets to the Jets sold out in roughly 17 minutes. Individual game tickets went on sale in September and opening night tickets sold out.
So it's on to the secondary market for fans wanting to attend the Jets' home opener — where they'll find some tickets listed at close to 13 times their face value.
Here's a look at some sources for tickets and where the current highs and lows, as well as quantities, are for the Jets opener. You'll notice that many of them are selling the same row and section; this is not due to the fact that the row is 10,000 seats long, but rather that they're all pulling from the same ticket pool. So we're listing them for comparison's sake (all dollars are U.S.).
In July, tickets for the home opener were listed on StubHub for an average of $1,711 with the average ticket sold for the event at $713.
Here are some tickets that have sold on StubHub in the last month; here's a handy MTS Centre seating chart for comparison's sake.
| Section | Row | Recently Sold | Avg. Sale Price For Section |
| 327 | 12 | $355.00 | $552.00 |
| 303 | 3 | $699.00 | $699.00 |
| 313 | 12 | $725.00 | $733.00 |
| 112 | 15 | $1,699.00 | $1,699.00 |
| 105 | 14 | $1,024.00 | $965.00 |
The secondary ticket market isn't just for brokers, though. On Kijiji.ca, there are dozens of fans selling (and asking for) tickets to the opener, and some of them don't even want to bend you over as they take your wallet!
"What? Jets tickets? Look, I'm really putting all of my energy into this selling this Lindros card … can you call back in a few hours? Kay-bye."
Being that the Jets are an insanely hot ticket, it's going to be interesting to see what kind of dynamic grows between the team, the arena and the scalpers. Please recall when season tickets went on sale, how the Jets began cancelling season ticket orders from "people who they would only say didn't want to agree to the terms set out on the driveto13.com website." (And that live in Alabama, one assumes.) Will the battles continue into the season?
The great thing about being a fan with a ticket to history: It's your call. Sell it and you might be able to fund a season's worth of tickets, like some fans attempt to during the Winter Classic.
Keep it, and you get to be a part of history. It's a win-win … even if the Jets don't.