John Wall Street analyzed the Minnesota Timberwolves today from the angle of “price integrity.”
Great stuff.
We don’t find enough examples of “price integrity” in tickets because that part of the discussion is often handed over to the secondary market’s myth of “the free market will decide.”
Matthew Caldwell has done something difficult with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
What?
He’s raised prices.
That’s not the hard part.
The bigger issue is that he’s held the line on the new prices by refusing to discount and allowing attendance to drop by 5%.
“Dave, attendance fell?!”
Sure. But revenue jumped 9%. By the playoffs, the Wolves were posting club-record gates of $3 to $4 million.
The math on the decision worked.
I’m going to teach you to focus on a fan-first approach. That won’t change.
But what the Timberwolves have done here is competent, data-driven, and unique in sports business.
There is also a bit here that the math alone doesn’t teach you that makes this a fan-focused set of decisions as well…even if no one recognizes them as such.
Trust
Price integrity is a trust problem.
The Check Casher raises the price and asks, “Did we charge as much as we possibly could?”
The Relationship Builder raises prices and asks, “Did we deliver value? Did we build trust?”
Math and extraction answer the first question. The fan is a partner in answering the second.
The Timberwolves prove that it isn’t an either/or situation. You can ask the second set of questions and deliver on the bottom line.
Look at the renewal rate to see how this thinking might look.
The Timberwolves renewed 84% of ticket holders. The industry standard is usually given as around 90%.
The Timberwolves’ number is strong for a team that raised prices significantly.
But it doesn’t tell us everything.
Why did the fans renew? Did they renew because they felt like they were getting a fair value? Or did they renew just because the team is performing well right now?
Math alone won’t give us the answer.
That 16% is a mystery without context.
Some had lives change: new jobs, kids left home, or something else.
Some felt the price to value equation didn’t work.
Some…something else entirely.
You don’t know if you don’t ask.
This goes for the 84% that renewed as well.
Were they happy to pay more? Resigned? Just drug along by momentum?
Context matters.
The Relationship Builder digs deep, gains context, puts the renewal number into perspective.
This matters because trust needs consistency. You make a promise and deliver once, but that’s only a data point.
The Timberwolves held the line on discounts, prices, and action for one season. You could say it was easy: coming off a conference finals appearance, Anthony Edwards playing lights out, and new ownership with goodwill.
The wind at their back.
Caldwell knows this. He admits that things can change quickly.
Injuries. A down season. A star player traded.
The price discipline that was easy to maintain in the good times gets tested quickly when things begin to change.
This is where trust is deepened or lost.
It is easy to fall back on “traditional” sportbiz habits.
Discounts. Papering the house. Going all in with brokers.
The Timberwolves have resisted for one year. Trust and relationships demand you do it every year.
Consistency builds trust.
Your Brand Builds Your Price Floor
The Miami Heat don’t tank.
The Miami Heat don’t start a season prepared to lose to get a top draft pick. They don’t ask fans to pay full price for a team designed to fail.
That’s a commitment to the product.
Price integrity flows from that foundation.
Pat Riley has built a brand in Miami, Heat Culture. It tells a story about grit, hard work, and effort no matter who is on the roster.
Players talk about it. Fans wear it on their shirts.
The Heat aren’t defined by one player or season. They are defined by a commitment that spans decades.
This commitment creates value. That value supports a price floor.
The Heat are always competing. The value never collapses. The fan knows that the team has made a promise.
Caldwell talks about how circumstances can change.
He’s right. Things do change. You can’t control everything. That’s why investing in your brand matters. You have to make a promise about what you stand for, independent of the win-loss record.
The promise is credible because it costs you something to keep it. The Heat sacrifice the easy narrative of the “rebuild.” The Timberwolves sacrificed 5% of attendance.
A brand promise that doesn’t cost you something is just a press release…empty words, fluff.
Broken trust.
The Check Casher counts the receipts from a good season. The Relationship Builder builds a brand that can survive during the bad ones.
The Bill Always Comes Due
Caldwell inherited a challenge.
The team was 11th in attendance and 24th in gate receipts. That’s a brand problem dressed in a pricing problem’s uniform.
Fans were showing up, but they weren’t paying the full cost.
The previous ownership group used tricks and promo offers to fill the last 2,000 to 3,000 seats.
Great.
They manufactured sellouts. That might improve the experience. But Caldwell made a strong point about paying fans being more invested in the experience than fans sitting in comped seats.
Worse…the lesson that the Timberwolves were teaching a large group of fans was that the product wasn’t worth the asking price.
“Hold on. There will be a better deal.”
#PaysToWait
The secondary market has no floor when the primary market has no discipline.
Sure, when the team was good, prices surged…and brokers call it “hot.”
Yay!
The team was the center of attention. They didn’t need any help selling seats.
How about when the team wasn’t doing well?
Prices fell. The brokers would cut prices. The team would run promotions. The brand absorbed the damage.
The big lesson is that the damage of cutting prices, running promos, and seeing cheap prices on the secondary market is sticky. The perception of the value of your event plummets and its hard to turn around.
As a team, you have to hold the line.
The Check Casher doesn’t care. Cut the prices. Move on.
Is there a mess?
That’s the next person’s problem.
The old way of doing business left damage. That’s the situation that Caldwell is working to fix.
The 5% attendance drop isn’t just the cost of a new strategy. It’s a bill from the old way of doing business.
Teaching fans that there might be a discount or a promotion costs you…dearly. In revenue and perception.
Retraining fans to look at the value means holding the line.
Turning around a market conditioned to wait for the deal takes time. The Timberwolves held the line for one year.
Now they have to do it again.
Tell Your Story
The team president who reads the JWS piece and wants to gain price integrity will face a real problem.
The culture of short-term results.
The owner may buy the short-term logic. The marketing team, the sales team, and the media…they likely buy it too.
Traditional metrics can punish people who are doing the right thing.
Attendance might drop. Revenue may not immediately jump.
If you measure the wrong things, you look like an idiot.
You must take control of the numbers and the narrative.
The old dashboard measures phone calls made, contacts, open rates, and sell through.
A new dashboard may include brand health, NPS score, and return customers. The early signals of success may show up in other ways, like the percentage of fans who say they’d recommend the experience to a friend.
There may be corrections you make due to the qualitative feedback from the people who didn’t renew.
These are leading indicators.
Increased sales and higher attendance are lagging indicators.
You panic before your strategy has a chance to work.
To fight this, you sell the story.
Caldwell held a stakeholder meeting before the price increase. He explained the investment in the team, the playoff appearances, the luxury tax. He told a story before he asked for money.
“We’re not raising prices because we can. We’re raising prices to build something sustainable.”
The team president who takes this to their owner isn’t just asking for patience. They are asking the owner to commit to holding the line against business as usual.
Hold the Line
Change is hard.
You must know what real change looks like. So you don’t jump back into the easy chasing-your-tail habits.
The new idea. The new promotion. The new discount.
Things that are action, feel like progress, but set you back.
Holding the line against down cycles, losing streaks, or the shifting sands. Because consistency builds trust and brands.
Neither is built quickly.
The Timberwolves held the line for one season. The math is working. The test comes when a season or two down the line the conditions aren’t as favorable.
The Heat have held the line for decades. They never stop trying to win.
That’s commitment. Hold the line long enough and it stops being a practice.
It becomes who you are.
The challenge you face is that too often the people who start the investment don’t always get to see those decisions pay off. Short-term metrics punish you before the long-term results arrive.
This doesn’t mean you don’t try.
It means you create a plan. Measure your numbers. Sell your story. Hold the line.
Want to figure out how to hold the line in your organization?
Start with the free diagnostic.
Want to go deeper?
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Dave Wakeman is a strategist. He teaches leaders globally how to treat fans like fans. The BBC called him “The King of Tickets.” He has created the “Fans 4 Life” program. If you want to create “Fans 4 Life”, start with the free scorecard.
Where Fans Go When There’s No Resale
My free webinar with Martin Haigh from Menta Tech. Wednesday, July 15 at 11 AM Eastern.
What happens if you don’t offer your fans an official resale channel?
The fan with the ticket to sell doesn’t just disappear, eating the ticket.
The buyer who wants a ticket to a sold out show?
They don’t just say, “Shoot. I’m out of luck.”
Both often end up on the secondary market, maybe buying for 2-3x or selling for pennies on the dollar.
These are customer experience failures that you shouldn’t allow to happen willy nilly.
I’ll talk with Martin for 30 minutes about the experience, the opportunities, and the options…FREE.