Where to get Maple Leafs playoff tickets—and the giant piles of money they’re going to cost

Where to get Maple Leafs playoff tickets—and the giant piles of money they’re going to cost

Getting this close will likely cost you at least $300 (Image: Toronto Maple Leafs)

The Toronto Maple Leafs begin their first postseason run in nine years against the Boston Bruins on the road tomorrow night. The series returns to the Air Canada Centre on May 6 for games three and four, and, unsurprisingly, playoff-starved fans snapped up all available tickets in minutes (despite a sizeable markup). Still, if you’ve got a little tenacity and a lot of money, there are several ways to get seats. Tips on where to look—and how much you’ll pay—below.

The official route

• Playoff tickets through Ticketmaster are 75 per cent more expensive than regular season games—and that’s if you can actually get them. Ticketmaster’s only releasing tickets for the the May 6 and May 8 games to fans who signed up online for the Leafs Last Minute Club before April 24.
• A limited number of seats are still available for the first three games in Boston, ranging from $115 to $405 (plus airfare).

The resale market

• On eBay, first-round tickets start at $182.50 for a single, 300-level seat to the home game on May 8 and run all the way to $38,021 for a 400-level suite—which holds 20 people—for May 12 (if a sixth game is necessary).
StubHub has over 600 tickets available for each of the May 6 and May 8 games. A standing-room-only spot on the 300 level starts around $165, while you could pay anything from $1,500 to $3,300 for two seats together on the 100 level (disregarding one money-grabbing attempt to net an outlandish $88,000). For the May 12 game, the starting price jumps to over $300.
• Similarly, Toronto-based Ticket Time’s seats start at $261 per ticket on the 300 level and rise to $1,518 for a seat in the 15th row of the centre section of the lower level for the May 6 and May 8 games.
• For fans willing to brave the wilds of Craigslist, we found lower-level tickets for as low as $500 each and a few more at around $600 for the first two home games. Tickets on the 300 level go as low as $250 each, but $300 and up is much more common.