The cold reality is that the league's teams have to pay for the spasm of new buildings that have gone up over the last decade. Twenty of the league's 29 teams are either already playing in arenas less than a decade old or will be in a new building by 2004. And the Knicks play in a refurbished Madison Square Garden. All those fancy digs cost serious coin. Here is what the league says.
Some teams provide more.
Some teams, like the Sonics, have actually cut ticket prices this season. And anyway, most of the league's fans, it maintains, watch the games on television and never set foot in league arenas. In some cases, it costs as much as, if not less, than going to the movies. So people can go to our games. But they're not the prime seats.