How to Get NHL Playoff Tickets

After a grueling six-month regular season, 16 NHL teams spend each April gearing up for the "second season," better known as the Stanley Cup playoffs. In hockey-crazed towns like Montreal, Toronto and Pittsburgh, tickets to playoff games may be much more difficult to come by than they are in cities where hockey is not as ingrained in the culture, such as Nashville and Dallas.

Instructions

    • 1

      Purchase tickets through the box office, but first determine the availability of tickets to the general public. Season ticket holders are offered the first opportunities to buy playoff tickets. What tickets remain are offered to the general public through the box office. In some cities, this number is very small. For instance, the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 2010 playoffs reserved 14,000 seats for their season-ticket holders. That left a little over 3,000 seats per game for group sales, visiting team allotment and general public sales. The roughly 1,500 tickets available to fans through the box office were sold out in minutes.

      On the other hand, teams like the Nashville Predators struggle to fill their arenas, even for the playoffs. In their 2010 playoff series against eventual champion Chicago, the Predators still had hundreds of unused tickets available at game time. In the 2009 playoffs, there were plenty of empty seats for big series in Anaheim, Calif., and Raleigh, N.C.

    • 2

      Check with online ticket brokers such as StubHub, HotSeats or TicketsNow for secondary sales of playoff tickets. In the old days, this was known as scalping. As with the scalpers, expect to pay a premium. In the 2010 playoffs, first-round tickets to a Penguins game were selling for double the face value of the ticket. In the Stanley Cup finals, StubHub had tickets in Chicago listed for more than five times the face value.
      Ticketmaster launched its own resale service called TeamExchange, which only resells season tickets that would go unused.
      Ticketwood.com does not sell tickets directly, but compares the prices and seats of different online brokers, in much the same way that Kayak.com retrieves info on airline tickets.

    • 3

      Check classifieds sites such as Craigslist.com. Ticket holders will sell their seats to playoff games here, but like the online brokers, will charge a premium. Unlike many of the ticket broker sites like StubHub, Craigslist provides no guarantees or safeguards as to the validity of tickets sold there.

    • 4

      Call in your business contacts. Many large companies buy season tickets or luxury suites for NHL teams, and often use those seats to entertain important business clients. If a business is wooing you as a client, the NHL playoffs might be a good time to negotiate. As the Carolina Hurricanes even point out, renting an executive suite or buying premium seats "is the perfect opportunity to entertain and impress in affordable luxury."