djmhawk

Ya just went with the credits for future games with interest option - I'm keeping my season tickets regardless of lockout outcome and renewing next year and that money will get 0% interest in my bank account or lose 20% a year in stock market :), so the interest they are offering sounds like a great deal for me. If the cash for your season tickets was a bigger deal for you I could see wanting it back.

Obviously anyone would be a gigantic improvement over the ASG. There aren't many sports owners who could possibly suck that bad, not many who have permanently damaged a city's sports like ASG has. So, I'm excited we got someone new, someone who at least claims to be excited about owning a team and winning. The big unknown with Meruelo is just how interested he really is in this team and how much money he has to burn. History has shown that owners that really want to win and can spend ridiculous sums of money to do it bring championships. The pizza business he owns is not that big - it was how he got his start but a 50-store pizza franchise is at best worth in the 10s of millions. Obviously he has leveraged that start into a lot of new projects that he has made a lot of money in and is very successful - anyone buying a NBA franchise has a lot of money. The other purchases his group (tv station, resort) has made has been also in the tens of millions - this looks like the biggest thing he's ever bought. So, the risk here is this is a guy who loves basketball, wants to win, but he's also a guy who has a net worth in the low hundreds of millions tops, and has his own investment company with a bunch of other rich investors looking to make a return on their money, and he bought just over half the Hawks from ASG to fulfill his dreams but also given how desperate the ASG were to find an investor as a shrewd business deal. He may want to win, but ultimately he thinks he is going to make money from the Hawks (and is betting on the lockout being a very positive owner outcome and instantly making his investment worth more money). The news articles I've read has said Cuban has spent/lost $150M post-buying Mavs to get them a championship, and is Meruelo a guy who has the cash to burn to that level? My hunch right now is no, he just isn't that rich that he can spend at that level. If he was, would he leave the ASG with a share of interest in the Hawks still? If he was, would his net worth and really any indication of his company have flown under the radar of the business press for the last decade (except as he tried to make deals in the 10s of millions with other businesses, except as he made purchases in the 10s of millions, which are the sort of thing that are often heavily leveraged and wouldn't require anywhere near those amounts as cash to acquire).So, I'm happy now, I'm optimistic he's going to do more with our team than we've seen in the past, but I don't think this is the kind of game changing owner who will transform our Hawks to a championship level.

> Did you have season tickets last year? This was my first year I had season tickets. > Where did you sell your tickets? Is this how you got the value for the games you attended? I am ignoring face value here. I sold them mostly on craigslist and stubhub - also a couple to people I knew. Stubhub very easy but 15% seller's fees plus 10% buyer's fees means stubhub is making a lot of money on it. Craigslist 100% profit but just dealing with emails and meeting up with people to exchange is its own hassle. I counted fair market value on tickets I sold as how much money I actually recouped for them. For every game that I attended, I went online to fansnap and craigslist and looked for the cheapest comparable seats over the course of the couple weeks to couple days (which is how I would have probably bought them if I didn't have season tickets) and counted fair market value for those as a fair estimate of what I would have probably have paid for them if I had been the buyer. > With face value, did the Hawks actually put different face values on all the tickets you purchased? Seems like some Q-cue going on here, so did they ever give you information on how Q-cue actually worked? Yes, when I got my tickets they had different face values on each ticket which in sum added up to what I paid for the season tickets. The face values broke out to: Preseason games: $10, $12, $15, & Heat preseason $27 Regular season: 9 $16 (week-day or sunday games against lottery-bound opponents) 13 $20 (9 weekend games against poor opponents, couple weekday games against bad opponents) 7 $25 (chicago, magic, spurs in this category) 6 $27 (magic, knicks, thunder games) 2 $32 (celtics twice) 3 $43 (lakers & 2 heat)

I bought 4 season tickets this year ($999 per ticket, 200s). I got them pretty close to start of season so they have to be about as bad as any season ticket holder that pays that price could have. I figured I'd go to half the games, sell the rest, and see if it turned out to be a good deal or not by end of the year. I just sold the last of my tickets for regular season, so here are the results: Spent $999 on tickets, so that is average cost of $22.70 per ticket. The actual 'face value' of each ticket varied from $10 (first pre-season) to $43 (heat/lakers) and added up to $999. I used the tickets for 20 games, and sold tickets to 24 games. The games I went to had a total face value of $437, and to just buy those same tickets from reseller market online would have cost me $567. The games I sold had a total face value of $567, and I sold those tickets online (combination of online 3rd party resellers and direct sales to people) for net (after taking out all the fees and just counting cash I got) for $756. So, in total I ended up paying $244 for the 20 games I went to, which is $12.44 per ticket, compared to what it would have cost me to go buy those tickets online would have been $29.08 per ticket. Of the 44 games, 25 of them you could probably attend for less than what season ticket holders are paying face value for tickets, but then theres about 12 that its a wash, and another 7 that were worth a substantial amount more than face value that offset all the ones you are taking a loss on. Overall, Hawks season tickets turn out to be a pretty good deal, although dealing with the selling of all the extras make it more hassle than its worth unless you are having fun with it or attending well more than half the games. I looked at the Hawks "Flex Plan" as well. If you only got a flex plan for Heat, Lakers, Celtics, & Knicks games, then I think that could turn out for you slightly better than buying any other way, but its still overpriced for every other game where you can buy from a season ticket holder taking a loss on the 25 games going for under face value, and for the other dozen games since the flex cost is still double to triple the season ticket holder cost, you can still end up getting tickets for those games from 3rd party sellers cheaper than direct from hawks. And I don't comprehend why anyone would buy tickets for hardly any single games ever for Hawks from Ticketmaster/box office direct. I have a lot more data, but thought maybe that might be interesting to someone...