If you're looking for tickets to Sunday's Rockets game, good luck.
Just in case you went to bed early – nobody could blame you, considering how badly the home team was losing – the Houston Rockets staged one of the most stunning comeback victories in basketball history Thursday night, staying alive for a seventh-game showdown against the Los Angeles Clippers on Sunday.
Even Kayla Ramsey, a ticket broker who cashes in when Houston sports teams get hot, didn't even bother watching the end of the game. Then her phone started ringing late last night, first with an alert from her business partner at the Houston Ticket Store, then with calls from fans desperate to buy tickets.
"Oh man!" she said. "My phone hasn't stopped since midnight."
Season ticket holders are sitting pretty, but fair weather fans scrambling to buy their way into the Toyota Center Sunday discovered Friday morning that even the cheapest nosebleed seats were selling for at least $250. Nonetheless, many of them didn't seem to care.
"Oh, they're excited," Ramsey said. "They really don't care about the price, half of them. Half of them are like, 'Just get me in, I don't care.' Some are like, 'I'll wait.' I think if they wait, it'll just drive the price up."
Of course, prices already vary wildly, depending upon where you can afford to sit.
"About 250 each upstairs, 250 to 300 each upstairs," Ramsey said. "Anything lower level, about 450 each and up. Anything center court is going to run probably 1200 and up."
The cheapest option is just buying a T-shirt and staying at home. On the morning after the Rockets' electrifying victory, fans were digging through the red shirts on the racks at Academy stores, whose managers shrewdly placed the team's gear just inside their front doors.
"They won!" said Valerie Gomez Peguero as she shopped for Red Nation shirts. "They came back! It feels like Clutch City all over again!"
Meanwhile, in Pearland, a family-owned business called Koza's Inc. had an especially compelling reason to root for the home team. Two decades ago, Koza's produced more than a half-million T-shirts and ballcaps celebrating the Rockets first NBA championship.
"We worked 24/7 for nine days," said Joe Koza, the founder of the business. "We hired about a hundred temporary employees to substitute our workforce. And all in all, when it was all over, we produced about 250,000 hats and another 250,000 T-shirts."
On Friday, as the company coincidentally celebrated its 50th anniversary with catered barbecue and a party, its owner predicted the Rockets just might do it again.
"I think they can do it," he said. "And we're going to gear up. We've got a lot of horsepower here that we can go to work with."
Houston will find out if they can do it Sunday, when the Rockets will reinforce their reputation as either Clutch City or Choke City.
