NEW YORK — In just over a month, Madison Square Garden will host the most expensive regular-season basketball game in NBA history. A record once held by Staples Center for the night of Kobe Bryant’s final NBA game is now set to belong to the defending champion Knicks, who beat the San Antonio Spurs 4-1 in the 2026 NBA Finals, and on Oct. 20 will receive their championship rings and hang a ...

Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns of the New York Knicks celebrate with the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy during the New York Knicks Championship ticker tape parade and victory rally celebrating winning the 2026 NBA Finals on June 18, 2026, in New York City.

Angelina Katsanis/Getty Images North America/TNS

NEW YORK — In just over a month, Madison Square Garden will host the most expensive regular-season basketball game in NBA history.

A record once held by Staples Center for the night of Kobe Bryant’s final NBA game is now set to belong to the defending champion Knicks, who beat the San Antonio Spurs 4-1 in the 2026 NBA Finals, and on Oct. 20 will receive their championship rings and hang a banner from the MSG rafters. Then they will face Philadelphia's LeBron James, Jaylen Brown, Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey, who are gunning for the Knicks’ title throne.

The average ticket price for Kobe’s final game in 2016 at Staples Center ran fans north of $1,100 a seat. A decade later, the Knicks have more than doubled it: the average sits at over $2,600 a seat, according to TickPick, with the most expensive seats topping $50,000 and the cheapest now running north of $1,800.

It’s not hard to see why this one broke the record instead of just approaching it. A team unveiling its first championship banner in 53 years is, on its own, a night the market would pay a premium for. James debuting for a new team, on a roster that just added Brown to Embiid and Maxey, is also, on its own, a night the market would pay a premium for. Most seasons, the league gets one moment like that. This year, both landed on the same Tuesday, in the same building, and the ticket market started adding the numbers together.

None of this is the result of the pricing controversy that made headlines this past week — MSG’s since-corrected “mistake” that briefly pushed primary-market prices above $1,000 before the team paused sales and pledged refunds. The record-breaking number here is coming from the secondary market, moving on its own, pricing in what people are actually willing to pay to be in the room.

And people are willing to pay a lot. Sixty-seven percent of this year’s ticket buyers are returning customers, up sharply from last year, according to The Athletic — fans who were already coming back, now buying deeper into a season with a banner attached to it. Searches for tickets are up 174% year over year, per the same report.

For context on just how far outside the normal range Oct. 20 sits: it’s still not the most expensive ticket the Knicks have sold this year. A pair of Celebrity Row seats for Game 3 of the Finals against San Antonio sold for $500,000 apiece — a combined $1 million donation to the Knicks’ Garden of Dreams Foundation, split between a law firm and a private equity firm. Championship basketball, it turns out, still costs more than the promise of it.

What’s happening Oct. 20 is a regular-season game getting priced like a Finals game before a single possession has been played.

If the price tag has you rethinking your season altogether, there’s a reason not to. Oct. 20 is an outlier by design, not a preview of what every night at the Garden will cost.

The Knicks’ next home game — Oct. 27 against a Detroit Pistons team with no ring ceremony and no LeBron subplot attached — is currently listed starting around $293. Elevated, still, for a Pistons game in an ordinary year. But a fraction of what it’ll cost to watch the banner go up, and proof the market isn’t broken — it’s just recognizing, for one night, exactly what it’s being asked to witness.

Fifty-three years is a long time to wait for a night like this. Judging by what people are willing to pay to be inside the building when it finally arrives, the city hasn’t forgotten how long it was.