Little Leg Room? Some Fans Are Not Happy About New TD Garden Seats

BOSTON (CBS) – As part of a $100 million ongoing renovation project, the TD Garden replaced all its arena bowl seats and added about 500 new seats to the upper levels.

As events and games started to pick up over the weekend, fans started to notice something different about the new seats.

“I mean my knees were like digging into the seat in front of me,” said Cosmo Brown of Wakefield, who was at the Sebastian Maniscalco comedy show Friday night. “Definitely not the best experience.”

@tdgarden @celtics these new seats are terrible … Not impressed as a 6 ft + basketball enthusiast … This is going to be a rough season pic.twitter.com/wFon4MuDuD

— Michele Perry (@maperry44) October 5, 2019

“The first thing I did was I sat down and looked at my son who is nearly six feet, and I was like ‘wait a minute,’” said Michael Clements of Northbridge. “I am way too tight in this seat. My knees are touching the front of the seat. This is not comfortable. It took away from the game experience actually.”

Hey @tdgarden, new seats are pathetic. Thanks for taking away leg and arm room.

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— Michael Clements (@MAClementsCPA) October 6, 2019

More than two dozen people tweeted about a lack of leg room at their events. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Garden said, in part, “For the first time in nearly 25 years, we updated the seating inside TD Garden. We’ve received feedback from fans and can appreciate that, as with any change, it takes some time to get used to such major changes.”

PSA the new seats at the Garden are HORRIBLE. If you are over 5’6” and are claustrophobic do NOT attend and event there!!! Very disappointed! @tdgarden

— Bosmo Crown (@cozbrown) October 5, 2019

But people short and tall told WBZ it was more than just a minor change. “Everybody around me, we all had the same comments,” Michael Clements said. “This is crazy, we can’t even move now, we’re so snug in here. So, it seemed to be the topic of the whole game, really… The ticket prices aren’t cheap, so to be uncomfortable during the whole game was really disappointing.”

Cosmo Brown said it might change the way he buys tickets. “I may go for floor seats from now on if I go to an event there.”