The excitement that a young Utah Jazz team brought to the court last season, even well before it made the run to the NBA Western Conference Finals, has translated so well at the box office that the Jazz are leading the league in new season tickets sold for the 2007-08 season with 5,300.
That number is second all-time in the NBA, eclipsed only by the 8,000-plus new full-season tickets purchased in Miami when Shaquille O'Neal left the Los Angeles Lakers for Florida, said NBA senior vice president for team marketing and business operations Scott O'Neil.
The Jazz are also in the NBA's top three with their 95 percent season-ticket renewal rate for next season, which begins Oct. 30 with Utah at Golden State. The first home game is Nov. 1 with Houston.
The EnergySolutions Arena lower bowl is essentially sold out for 2007-08, and about 15,000 season tickets have been purchased in all, leaving fewer than 5,000 available for single games in the 19,911-seat building.
Season tickets for 2007-08 went on sale March 1, and about 1,000 were sold on that first day, with sales holding steady from then through the playoffs despite a price increase in many seats, said Jim Olson, Jazz vice president for ticket sales. Sales are slower but still strong this summer.
"We actually have more season tickets sold now than we did in 1997-'98," Olson said, referring to the season that ended with the Jazz of John Stockton, Karl Malone and Jeff Hornacek falling to the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan in the NBA Finals for the second consecutive season.
The Jazz's success — in a league seeing a 40 percent increase in new season ticket sales — will be featured Monday in a story in the national Sports Business Journal, said NBA director of communications Christopher Wallace.
The NBA expects to set an all-time attendance mark in 2007-08.
O'Neil said the usual NBA-wide increase in new season tickets over the past 10 yeas has been 5 to 10 percent. He calls the 40 percent "staggering" and added the Jazz "are leading the way."
Second in new ticket sales is Golden State, a playoff surprise like the Jazz, followed by fast-closing Boston, which recently acquired Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. Toronto leads the NBA in renewals.
Olson attributes Utah's growth to product and availability. "The most powerful selling point has been the excitement and hope of where this young team can go," he said. Utah finished with a 51-31 record to win the Northwest Division and won two playoff series before falling to eventual-champion San Antonio in Game 5 of the conference finals.
"And the second thing that's really helped," Olson said, "is that we did have some good seat locations to sell. In the past, (such as) '97-'98, the team was obviously a very good team, but all the seats were sold (going into the season), especially the good seats. There had been a decline over the past couple of years in season tickets, so seats have opened up."
No longer.
Even those easy chairs behind the public address announcer/ TV play-by-play people at center court — the ones for $700 a game but only if you buy four of them for the season — are 100 percent renewed from last year. The $400-a-night VIP front-row chairs and the $130 down-low seats behind the baskets are all gone.
The Jazz are, however, about to start selling their mini-packages, 10 and 20 games, all likely upstairs, and in a few weeks, they'll concentrate on their group sales, all on high. Single-game tickets, what's available, go on sale Oct. 1.
ANOTHER 40 PERCENT: Utah's sharp-shooting center, Mehmet Okur, is at least partly responsible for a big sales increase in a product he endorses in Turkey. A member of the Turkish national team that will play in Eurobasket 2007 next week, Okur has for several months endorsed a fruit drink known as "Dimes." After Okur toured the production plant recently, Ozan Diren, a member of the Dimes board of directors, told his Web site (memo13.com), "Dimes had always been the first preference for mothers and children. However, with Memo we were extremely pleased with increasement in the number of teenagers that have also started to prefer and use Dimes. During our past six months together, Dimes has increased its sales 40 percent." Dimes extended Okur's contract.
MALONE COURT: A renovated basketball court at Louisiana Tech University, alma mater for former Jazz great Malone and current Jazzman Paul Millsap, will be named Karl Malone Court. Malone donated $300,000 toward the project this summer.
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