Tonight's Oilers at Mammoth game in Salt Lake City is a tidy little case study in why patience pays off at the box office. We've been tracking this one since mid-July, and the swing is dramatic: tickets peaked at $162 back on July 22, and as of yesterday they'd bottomed out at $43.70 — the lowest price we've recorded for the matchup. That's a 33% drop in just the last seven days alone, with the median over the past month sitting at $71. If you grabbed a seat early thinking you were beating the rush, the data says you overpaid.
It's not a fluke. This is basically the hockey market doing exactly what hockey markets do.
What the league-wide numbers back up
Our NHL price index, updated as of October 16, shows a get-in median of $57.25 across 472 upcoming games — right in the neighborhood of where Oilers-Mammoth has landed. The league's priciest ticket right now belongs to the Rangers, with a median of $109.25, while teams like the Panthers sit at a far friendlier $35 median. Mammoth games generally price closer to the affordable end of that spectrum, which is part of why tonight's number is such a good entry point if you're in or near Salt Lake City and want to see Connor McDavid up close without blowing the night's budget.
The bigger pattern: sports tickets reward waiting
This isn't just an Oilers-Mammoth thing. Our best-time-to-buy research, built on 8,038 events tracked between late July and mid-October, found that sports tickets fall a median of 21% between the 30-day mark and the day of the game — the steepest drop of any category we measured, ahead of concerts and comedy. Look even closer to showtime and the pattern holds: in the final two weeks before puck drop or tip-off, sports tickets got cheaper 65% of the time, with a median drop of 13%.
Translation: if you're the type who buys the moment single-game tickets drop, you're statistically buying at the worst possible time. The crowd that waits is winning more often than not.
So why doesn't everyone wait?
Because waiting takes nerve, and sellouts are real. Nobody wants to watch a good seat vanish while they're still refreshing a price chart. But the Oilers-Mammoth swing is a good reminder that for most regular-season hockey — games that aren't marquee rivalries or playoff-adjacent — supply tends to outpace demand right up until puck drop, and sellers adjust accordingly. The $162 early buyers weren't wrong to want good seats. They were just early to a market that still had plenty of room to soften.
If you've got a hockey night on your calendar this season, treat the first price you see as a starting point, not a verdict. Check back a week out. Check again the morning of. And if you're shopping beyond tonight's game, the full NHL price table is worth bookmarking — it's updated regularly and shows exactly which teams are running hot and which ones, like Mammoth tonight, are quietly handing out some of the best value in the league.
Hockey season is long. Let the data do some of the waiting for you.
