Acquisition of Chris Paul boosts Clippers’ ticket sales

Add another benefit to the Chris Paul effect on the Clippers: a surge in ticket sales.

After the All-Star point guard joined the team’s roster this month, season tickets for the Clippers’ home games at Staples Center sold out and demand and prices for individual game tickets jumped on the resale market.

The Clippers open the season Sunday in Oakland against the Golden State Warriors and play their first home game Dec. 30 against the Chicago Bulls.

“When the trade was first announced, sales went through the roof,” said Nima Moayedi, chief executive of ticket broker Razorgator.com. The Clippers are the sixth-best-selling NBA team on the website; previously, the Clippers had not been in the top 10.

And with increased talk about the Clippers going deep into the NBA playoffs, the resale of Clippers tickets on StubHub.com has been running at a pace twice that of the Lakers, said Joellen Ferrer, a StubHub spokeswoman.

“Looking at sales over the last week, more than 8,500 Clippers tickets have been purchased and over 4,000 Lakers tickets have been purchased,” she said.

“Over the last week we’ve also seen over 150,000 page views for Clippers tickets” on the StubHub website, compared with about 100,000 for Lakers tickets, Ferrer said. A year ago, page views for Clippers seats “were probably half” their current level, she said.

Ticket prices for both teams’ games can climb into hundreds of dollars for seats close to the court. But generally speaking, prices for the Clippers — whose years of poor play left them a distant second in popularity to the Lakers, who have won five championships since 2000 — are still lower than those for Lakers games at Staples Center, which seats about 19,000 for basketball.

For instance, seats for the Clippers’ home game New Year’s Day against the Portland Trail Blazers started at $19 on Razorgator’s site, while those for the Lakers’ home game against the Houston Rockets on Jan. 3 started at $34.

“When you compare the Clippers against the Lakers in terms of price and popularity, they still are dwarfed by the Lakers,” Moayedi said.

SeatGeek.com, which combines ticket sellers in one location, said that although the average ticket price for a Clippers home game on its site rose 9.5% to $104.71 in the week after Paul’s trade from $95.63 the previous week, it still fell short of the Lakers’ $159.79 average in the week after Paul was acquired.

A surge in Clippers ticket prices isn’t unusual.

“We’ve seen this with other star players” when they’ve been traded, said Will Flaherty, a spokesman for SeatGeek.

After Carmelo Anthony was traded to the New York Knicks from the Denver Nuggets in February, ticket prices for Knicks games in the following week shot up 35% to an average of $167.78 from $124.09 in the week before the trade, Flaherty said.

The Lakers might not be getting the same buzz as the Clippers at the moment, but fans’ desire to attend Lakers games hasn’t dissipated.

The Lakers retained 97% of their season-ticket holders from last season and have since filled the empty slots from a waiting list to sell out their typical 12,000 season-ticket seats. An unspecified number of individual tickets for certain games remained available.

“We’re pleased once again there’s a great demand for the product,” said Tim Harris, the Lakers’ senior vice president of business operations.

The Clippers declined to comment on ticket sales. But also pleased is Barry Rudin, owner of Barry’s Ticket Service, a Calabasas-based broker that also is a Clippers sponsor. The firm resells Clippers season-ticket seats it buys directly from the team and others.

Rudin suddenly has a hot commodity on his hands, with buyers “willing to pay twice as much as they were last year,” he said. “I’ve lost money most years on the Clippers, so this is a nice reward.”

How long the sales spike lasts remains to be seen. Most fans buy seats for NBA games that are no more than two or three weeks away, except for marquee games against big-name opponents, resellers said.

Razorgator’s Moayedi said his site already has seen Clippers sales start to level off “and time will tell how they continue to sell throughout the season,” which was shortened to 66 regular-season games from 82 because of the NBA lockout.

For the moment, though, “the Clippers are unseating the Lakers as the top team in Los Angeles as far as ticket sales are concerned” and that’s novel, StubHub’s Ferrer said. “We have always seen the Lakers surpass demand for the Clippers.”

james.peltz@latimes.com

Times staff writer Mike Bresnahan contributed to this report.