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Jets cancel season ticket accounts for scalping

Winnipeg Jets MTS Centre

WINNIPEG, CANADA - OCTOBER 7: Rookie Mark Scheifele #55 of the Winnipeg Jets , the last player on the ice after the team practice, takes a few extra minutes by himself to take a few more shots on goal at the MTS Centre on October 7, 2011 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. (Photo by Marianne Helm/Getty Images)

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Everyone knows that opening night tickets in Winnipeg are a hot commodity. That’s the same kind of understatement as saying “Shea Weber had a pretty good beard last season.” Even though face-value tickets max out at $192 per game, tickets on the secondhand market for opening night are going for more than $4,000. As the season approaches and tickets are increasingly out of control, the Jets organization is doing something about it.

According to James Mirtle of the Globe and Mail in Toronto:

“Winnipeg Jets say a number of season ticket accounts have been cancelled for activity regarding the re-sale of tickets.”

This isn’t the first time that the Jets organization has stepped up to limit the actions of scalpers. Back in June, True North cancelled ticket transactions that they didn’t think were legitimate. After it only took 17 minutes to sell 13,000 season tickets, there were bound to be some issues with average fans looking for single game tickets. Mix in the aura and intrigue of the first regular season NHL game in fifteen years and tickets for Sunday’s game against Montreal have long since been spoken for. Predictably, not everyone who was lucky enough to land tickets plans on using the tickets.

To give proper perspective, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper reportedly asked for 14 tickets to the game—and was only given two by the organization. It’s not every day that an organization refuses to fill the prime minister’s ticket request.

We have to give it up to the Jets organization to do whatever they can to make sure the tickets are getting into the fans’ hands. There’s a supply-and-demand effecting going on in Winnipeg. The MTS Center only holds 15,015 for hockey games and there are about 684,000 people in Winnipeg who want tickets. Considering plenty of scalpers got their hands on the tickets for opening night—and the rest of the season—the Jets are doing their part to get face-value tickets into the hands of their fans.

We wonder: what would have been the going rate if were the Canadiens were playing their opening night game in Atlanta?