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Today, the New Jersey Devils sent out an email to all season ticket holders regarding the status of their tickets. For full season ticket holders like myself, the tickets for the first six home games of the season will be available only through your ticket account on the Devils' official website. The rest of the home games will be printed and mailed out in February. It's a sensible way to make tickets available; more and more ticket sales for sporting events are being done online anyway, so it's not an unusual circumstance. I'm not sure if this also applies to partial season ticket holders, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's also the case. I do know that half-season and 13-game plan holders had the option to replace cancelled games; perhaps they will have to do so electronically? If you're one of those plan holders, then please let us know what's going on.
Incidentally, single game tickets will first go on sale at 7 PM on Wednesday, January 16 according to the team's official Twitter account. I also don't know why there's a two-day wait to sell tickets for individual games. The schedule has been released for a few days now. Given that there was a tentative agreement last Sunday, I would think that someone would have began preparations afterwards. Of course, I have no idea how much work is involved in preparing ticket sales for the public so maybe the wait is necessary. Maybe dealing with the plan holders came first and sorting that out was necessary before selling single games. In any case, that same tweet said that there will be a pre-sale if you sign up for Power Play, the Devils' mailing list. If you want to get in on that, then there's your way.
As an aside, I don't know what the prices are going to be for this season. When they're made available, I'll do a quick check to see whether they rose, fell, or remained the same.
Lastly, there's the secondary market. As you may or may not be aware, SBNation has a partnership with TiqIQ. It's a secondary market ticketing service that aggregates tickets for various events from other services and helps you select the one you want. I posted their various deals during the 2012 playoffs and I'm proud to say that we will continue this throughout the season. They will contact me to let me know of a deal, I'll make a post about it, and you, the reader and potential-ticket-buyer, benefit with an opportunity to get tickets at a potentially lower cost. Here's the first one for the home opener against Philadelphia on January 22, 2013:
Devils are back on the ice & the home opener is 1/22 vs PHI. Be there as they raise the banner--Get in for $78 here: http://tiqiq.us/IHT
I have to admit, I don't know if there will actually be a banner raising ceremony. The Devils traditionally have just had their division title banners in the rafters to little fanfare. Then again, they did go to the Eastern Conference Finals and won it. That's a more meaningful accomplishment than winning the division in my opinion. The last time this happened was in October 2001, and I can't remember whether or not there will be a banner raising ceremony or not. We'll just have to wait and see. All the same, buy a ticket to the game. It's been a while since we are the Rock after all.