A friend of ours who's a long-term Blazers season ticket holder just bought some extra tickets for some of the games that he figures his friends and family might be interested in attending. As a member of the faithful seat buyers' group, he was able to purchase them in a special offer last week. He had never bought extra tickets before, and so was experiencing for the first time the Blazers' "dynamic pricing" practices for individual game tickets:

Given the current demand for tickets, and to amplify the value of owning season tickets, we will continue to have dynamic pricing for individual game tickets. This means that each game will have a different price. The dynamic price is determined by a multitude of factors including opponent, night of week and tickets remaining

- Your season ticket price will remain at an overall lower price than purchasing tickets on an individual game basis at the dynamic rates

- In addition to first access, you will continue to enjoy the lowest price for any additional individual game tickets you choose to purchase. Please note: there is no longer one, flat Season Ticket Holder rate that applies to all games.

- Dynamic prices may change as the season progresses

The Heat and Lakers ducats were $75 a pop (although the Celtics were only $25).

Yikes. And if that $75 price is the lowest available now, it appears that the Blazers will be marking the seats up even higher as game time approaches. Shades of the airlines, or the scalpers on the street.

We encountered something like this on our recent trip to New York. We went to a wonderful Broadway play. Orchestra seats down in front were priced by the theater at an enormous premium -- so that the extra bucks that the audience was willing to pay for that vantage point went to the house, and not to some guy out on the sidewalk. But of course, those were for choice seats, not those on the roof.

In any event, our buddy also noted when he printed out his tickets that they showed a list price of $22 each on them. Apparently that's what you would have paid if you bought a whole season's worth in that seat, but it was less than a third of what he actually paid for that single game. It might make it hard for him to convince would-be buyers that he ever paid the $75 apiece for them.

In any event, the scalpers haven't gone away. It's just that now, it appears, the Blazers are their own scalpers.