5 Years of Denver Nuggets Season Tickets: Are They Worth It?

I bought Denver Nuggets season tickets five years ago and I'm still processing everything that's happened since. At the time, it felt like a straightforward decision — I'm a huge NBA fan, I was going to games anyway, and locking in seats made sense. What I didn't fully anticipate was how much the situation would shift once the team started winning. The ride has been genuinely great in some ways and pretty frustrating in others, and I think it's worth laying out both sides clearly if you're considering making the same call.

The Highs Are Real

Let me get the obvious stuff out of the way first: watching the Denver Nuggets and Nikola Jokic win the NBA Finals at home was one of the better experiences I've had as a sports fan in this city. Being in the building for a championship run — the actual building, with your actual seats — hits differently than watching it anywhere else. That's the version of season ticket ownership that sells you on the whole concept, and it delivered exactly what you'd hope for. The playoff atmosphere downtown during that run was something I won't forget.

Beyond the championship, five years of season tickets also meant meeting players, getting into special events, and picking up free merchandise along the way. Early on, those perks felt like genuine value-adds. The organization made it feel like being a season ticket holder meant something specific and a little exclusive.

What's Changed

Here's where things get more complicated. Over five years, my ticket prices went up 178%. That's not a typo. The team got better, the national profile grew, Jokic became one of the most talked-about players in the league, and the Nuggets organization priced accordingly. I get it from a business standpoint — demand is real. But that kind of increase changes the math significantly, especially if part of your original plan was reselling tickets to games you couldn't attend to offset the cost.

When ticket prices rise that sharply, the secondary market gets tighter. It's harder to sell individual games for a profit when the face value is already elevated. That flexibility — the ability to treat your season tickets partly as an investment — gets squeezed out. For a lot of season ticket holders I've talked to, that was a meaningful part of how they justified the expense.

The Diluted Experience

The price increase would sting less if the perks had kept pace, but that's not what happened. The benefits of being a season ticket holder have been noticeably diluted over time. What used to feel like a real reward for early commitment now feels closer to a standard transaction. The special access, the events, the sense that the organization valued long-term holders — a lot of that has faded as the fanbase expanded and demand increased. It's hard to maintain exclusivity when everyone wants in.

This isn't unique to Denver. It happens to most franchises once they start winning consistently. But if you're deciding whether to buy season tickets *now*, you're not getting the same deal the early adopters got. You're buying in at the peak of the price curve with a thinner set of perks than what was on offer a few years back.

So Are They Still Worth It?

Depends entirely on what you're after. If you're a serious Nuggets fan who wants guaranteed access to every home game, including playoff runs, and you can afford the current pricing without needing to resell tickets to break even, there's still a real case for it. Being in Ball Arena for big moments is hard to replicate.

If you're doing the math on it as a financial play — buy seats, resell what you don't use, come out ahead — that calculation is a lot harder to make work now than it was five years ago. The 178% price increase has largely closed that window.

My honest take after half a decade: the experience itself is still worth something. The economics of it are just less forgiving than they used to be, and you should go in knowing that before you sign anything.