Philly fan buys 18 tickets to 76ers/Pacers game for 72 cents — total

If you balked at buying Philadelphia 76ers tickets for 10 cents a pop back in November because you're not made of money, you really should've been trawling StubHub on Wednesday afternoon. You could've gotten a steal of a deal.

See, the 76ers aren't exactly an attractive watch these days. Yes, they'd won four of their last five games headed into Wednesday night, but even that only nosed them up to five games south of .500, which isn't very good, even for the East. Plus, the Sixers have the league's third-worst offense and play at the NBA's ninth-slowest pace, are playing without injured expected superstar Andrew Bynum, injured actual centerpiece Thaddeus Young and now recognizable (if past his prime) swingman Jason Richardson. Sure, point guard Jrue Holiday's a legit Eastern Conference All-Star, but he's not always very exciting; basically, your best shots at excitement at a Sixers game right now are Nick Young doing something ridiculous (likely) or Spencer Hawes checking into the game on his Segway (less so).

[Related: Sixers' Richardson out for season with knee injury]

Given that, it's kind of hard to justify dropping serious coin on a random mid-week 76ers game, especially when they're taking on a similarly not-so-thrilling opponent like the Indiana Pacers. Luckily, as Philly.com's Ryan Petzar shared Wednesday, you didn't have to drop very many coins for tickets to last night's game at all:

And so, he did:

The full out-of-pocket outlay for @mleif's upper-deck dominance? A cool $10.67 — $5 in service fees and $4.95 in "delivery" charges from StubHub, and a whopping 72 cents for the tickets. For less than the price of a beer and a hot dog, he bought out an entire row of seats to a live NBA basketball game. Why do it? As @mleif told Philly.com's Petzar, "It seemed like a funny idea, and the extra space to stretch out was a plus." Seems like sound reasoning to me.

How many other seats among the 15,299 in reported paid attendance at the Wells Fargo Center on Wednesday were unoccupied remains unclear, but the dirt-cheap secondary-market pricing only goes to confirm an ongoing trend in the NBA — teams, especially losing/uninteresting ones, are having trouble filling up their arenas on a nightly basis, even after offering freebies, discounts and promotional deals. Sometimes, as in this case, that can work in a shrewd fan's favor, even if only for the purposes of a joke and some extra leg room.

[Also: HGH testing coming soon to the NBA]

As for the game itself, the 76ers shot 34.4 percent from the floor as a team, attempted only seven free throws, committed 15 turnovers leading to 20 Indiana points, and lost by 19 in front of what Rob Maaddi of The Associated Press described as a "sparse crowd at the Wells Fargo Center" (natch) to a Pacers team that shot just 39 percent itself while playing on the final night of a back-to-back-to-back stretch. Sometimes, I guess, you get what you pay for.

Hat-tip to Deadspin.

NBA video from Yahoo! Sports:

Other popular content on Yahoo! Sports:
• USA's World Cup qualification off to a rocky start
• National Signing Day: Conference breakdown
• Kansas suffers one of the season’s most stunning upsets
• Vicious knockout puts Uriah Hall in spotlight's glare | Watch KO