SALT LAKE CITY — The NBA playoffs are back in Salt Lake City, and with the Jazz taking a 3-2 lead in the first round ahead of their chance to close out the LA Clippers Friday night, fans are buzzing.

That's not a surprise; of course Jazz fans are excited about their team being back in the playoffs. But to what extent? How many fans are interested, and how big of a jump in interest has been made from the regular season? How does that compare with league-wide interest? In order to find out, we looked at a few metrics to find out exactly how excited fans are about the Jazz right now.

Ticket market

It's a given that every playoff game is going to be a sellout. Despite their status as the third-least attended team on the road, nearly every home game, regular season or playoffs, sells out in Utah. The Jazz had an average announced attendance of 19,673 people, or 98.8 percent of the capacity 19,911.

But as we all know, those figures are inflated. Tickets distributed instead of tickets sold is usually the number released, and even that is sometimes artificially inflated. And even sellouts are a problem: how do you know whether a game is one that crossed the threshold because of those distributed tickets or one that was legitimately in demand?

One more accurate way we can track the demand for seats is data from the secondary ticket market. To find out, I contacted StubHub, probably the most well-known of these ticket markets. I asked them to compare the ticket markets for Friday night's Jazz vs. Clippers Game 6 to the other four Game 6s scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Here are their market results:

1. LA Clippers @ Utah Jazz — Average Ticket Price: $152

2. Boston Celtics @ Chicago Bulls — Average Ticket Price: $127

3. San Antonio Spurs @ Memphis Grizzlies — Average Ticket Price: $121

4. Washington Wizards @ Atlanta Hawks — Average Ticket Price: $104

5. Toronto Raptors @ Milwaukee Bucks — Average Ticket Price: $84

The Jazz/Clippers game also had the most ticket sales on StubHub as of mid-day Thursday, despite the fact that the game wasn't until Friday (unlike the games in Memphis and Milwaukee). Besides the interest from Jazz fans, there's also another factor: the game in Salt Lake City is the only one of the five where the home team has the chance to advance, not just stave off elimination in Game 6.

As of Friday morning, the cheapest ticket to get in the building on StubHub is $99. There are also hundreds of other listings from people trying to sell (and trying to buy!) tickets on KSL Classifieds.

Social media engagement

Here's another way of looking at the skyrocketing interest in the Jazz: engagement on social media. How many more likes, replies and shares do they get from fans during the playoffs when compared to the regular season?

With some help from the Jazz, I looked at their engagement across three social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I compared the total number of interactions on each platform during the regular season vs. the playoffs. Because up to 50 tweets are posted on Twitter per day, the per post averages are less than for the other social networks.

• Facebook: 1,900 interactions on an average post during the regular season, 2,900 interactions on an average post during the playoffs.
• Twitter: 141 interactions on an average post during the regular season, 386 interactions on an average post during the playoffs.
• Instagram: 4,300 interactions on an average post during the regular season, 6,800 interactions on an average post during the playoffs.

Those average interactions are up despite the Jazz's social team also posting far more frequently during the playoffs than they did during the regular season.

The fact that the Twitter interactions nearly tripled is a little bit surprising to me: I would have figured that the Twitter audience was among the Jazz's most loyal fanbase, watching the games in the regular season too. And maybe they are! But for whatever reason, that network has the largest percentage jump in interactions. Maybe more fans are coming to Twitter during the playoffs for information, like player injury status.

KSL.com traffic

Of course, there's another source of data: our traffic here on KSL.com! We cover the Jazz year-round, but have noticed a definite jump in interest in Jazz-related content recently.

How big is that jump? Well, page views from the reporting during the first five games of the playoffs are up 215 percent compared to already-high interest over the last month of the regular season. When we compare that to regular season averages, it's more in the range of a 400-percent increase.

That's across all of our platforms, too: our KSL.com app views show the same trend. Overall, it looks like more than 200,000 users (over 150,000 Utahns) have read KSL.com's Utah Jazz coverage on desktop, mobile or using the app since the playoffs began, for nearly 600,000 total page views. Now that's some interest!

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