Barclays Center releases June 2022 event calendar: eleven ticketed events, plus three graduations. The Liberty may help, but attendance still relatively modest.

The Barclays Center yesterday circulated its June 2022 event calendar, which has eleven ticketed events: seven New York Liberty games, three concerts, and the NBA Draft. 

The calendar, interestingly enough, also lists three graduation ceremonies: Borough of Manhattan Community College, the Graduate Center, and Hunter College. 

While the arena once listed such private events, it had stopped doing so, though, as I wrote last month, they are fairly easy to find. I found six for May.

June 2022

June 2021 and June 2019

June is typically a fairly slow month, perhaps in part because the arena hopes that early June would host the Brooklyn Nets in the NBA finals. 

The last two years, of course, were limited by the pandemic, though in 2021 the arena hosted four Brooklyn Nets playoff games, and two WNBA New YorkLiberty Games.

June 2021

As I wrote, the June 2019 calendar contained eight publicly ticketed events, including five concerts, the WorldPride Opening Ceremony, NYPD boxing, and the NBA draft, plus five graduation ceremonies.

June 2019

Barclays in June 2018 hosted seven publicly ticketed events, including six concerts and the NBA draft, plus one private event and four graduations.

The Liberty may help

While the concert schedule seems to have slowed down somewhat--perhaps because not every act is back to touring--the presence of the New York Liberty brings some ballast to the arena schedule. 

The challenge then is to fill the building, which has a capacity of 17,732 for basketball.

In 2021, the Liberty averaged 1,757 attendees a game. This year, so far, they've averaged 4,067, which is more respectable but still far from selling out the arena's lower bowl.

In 2019, playing in a small Westchester arena when owned by Madison Square Garden Company, they averaged 2,239. In 2018, they averaged 2,823 in Westchester. In 2017, their last year at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, they averaged 9,889.