Tom Cerasoli can measure Knicks mania by his inbox.
The Knicks are back in the NBA finals for the first time since 1999 and are on a winning streak that’s electrifying New York City. Cerasoli, the head of sponsorship and partnership management at Citi, is responsible for fielding internal requests for tickets to the finals. While he doesn’t have final say on who snags one of the firm’s coveted seats, he shed light on how the bank decides who gets them.
The demand is understandable. As of Friday morning, the cheapest pair of tickets for Game 3 at Madison Square Garden was selling for around $8,500 each on StubHub. President Donald Trump has said he plans to attend the Monday game, as has NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. For a global bank like Citi, access to those seats can be worth far more than their face value.
Client hospitality is all about driving commercial outcomes, Cerasoli said, and the Knicks have uniquely broad appeal. The biggest events are especially helpful for bankers trying to clinch or solidify relationships with current or prospective clients.
As Cerasoli sees it, the finals give executives a chance to land meetings with important clients, since they “can leverage this corporate hospitality in this unique moment in time to potentially deliver that experience of a lifetime.”
Citi isn’t an official sponsor of the Knicks or Madison Square Garden, but does have a suite and season tickets, which typically grant the firm between 30 and 40 seats per game. Cerasoli, who has worked in sports entertainment for more than two decades, knew it would be critical to secure extra seats in the postseason and helped Citi get more than 100 tickets to finals games.
“It’s one of those things where we know it’s going to be worth it, because we know the demand from clients and prospects, and from bankers who want to host them, is going to far exceed the inventory that we have,” he said.
His predictions proved correct — the excitement has reached a “fever pitch,” according to the number of emails Cerasoli was getting ahead of the finals. Employees submit official ticket requests through an internal system, but it’s up to Cerasoli and his team to “hedge a lot” on the hundreds of requests they’ve received.
His team works alongside lines of business that use “their own criteria” to sift through requests and decide who will attend. Some of the calculations are about simply being efficient with tickets.
There are layers of potential impact — helping a private banking and wealth client secure an unforgettable experience for their kid, for example, is “next level” — but Cerasoli said it’s hard to measure the exact returns on each hospitality experience, since some clients might attend multiple events.
“How do you attribute? What is the correlation of that one experience compared to maybe 14 others that this banker has done towards the contribution of revenue to the firm?” he said. “It’s an inexact science.”
While corporate hospitality events are reserved for business relationships, employees can often take advantage of sponsorships, like Citi’s connection with the New York Mets (who, as of now, are unlikely to get anywhere near the playoffs).
The Knicks’ second game against the San Antonio Spurs is Friday night, before the teams travel to Madison Square Garden for the third match on Monday.
Wall Street firms aren’t the only ones capitalizing on the Knicks finally (finally) making it back into the NBA Finals. An Upper East Side beer garden offered customers free drinks if the Knicks won the first game of the series, cushioned by a $5,000 winning bet on Kalshi, which the owner said would pay out to around $13,500 ahead of the game.
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