It’s a problem you might have faced before: you have tickets to a game, but it turns out you have to work. What do you do with them?
It turns out that NBA players face that problem 82 times per season. In the league’s collective bargaining agreement, teams are allowed to give their players four tickets to every home game and two tickets to every away game. To avoid seeming cheap, essentially every team does this, which means arena ticket sellers have to carve out a block of about 100 tickets for the players.
For most teams, they try to put the home team’s players' tickets near the home bench, and the visiting team’s tickets nearer to the away bench.