With one successful Gavin DeGraw concert that followed a January 14th Boston Celtics game at the city’s FleetCenter, plans to expand the idea to other sport teams are already under way.

“The concept I had was, ‘Let’s find another way to get people to want to come to sporting events – whether it be hockey games or basketball games,'” Mark Lev, ANC Sports executive VP of sales and marketing, told Pollstar. “The premise it’s based on is that teams have a need to sell tickets and they’re looking for innovative ways to do that.”

The “concert with a game” promotion began last year in a partnership between the National Hockey League’s Boston Bruins and ANC Sports, which provides venue display systems for sports, entertainment and retail facilities.

ANC Sports was able to put on two game/concerts at the FleetCenter with Godsmack and Dropkick Murphys with the help of Pretty Polly Productions and Paul Jarosik, who independently handles artist management and relationships,

“Buying a ticket to a sporting event is a value proposition and any time you can add more value, you’re increasing your potential of selling tickets,” Richard Krezwick, FleetCenter president/CEO and Bruins executive VP, told Pollstar. “Adding Dropkick Murphys to a Bruins game increased the value significantly. We sold 5,000 tickets more, in our estimation, by working with ANC and booking Dropkick Murphys.

“In this day and age, with the significant entertainment competition at every level, we need to make sports as fun and entertaining as possible,” he added.

Through the two initial concerts, Lev was able to convince ANC client the Celtics to allow DeGraw to perform after the January game. After the performance was announced, the game sold out all 17,600 tickets.

To entice artists to perform, the company uses a variety of promotional tools through the team – including drop-in ads during TV and radio broadcasts, video board announcements during home games, the team’s Web site, and e-mail blasts to the team’s subscriber database. Generally, these are places where an artist’s name wouldn’t typically show up, Lev said.

The next event for ANC is another DeGraw performance, which is scheduled to take place during and after a February 16th New Jersey Nets vs. Sacramento Kings game at the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, N.J. And it won’t stop there, Lev said.

“I soon expect to be working with a whole host of others after some meetings next week,” he said, adding that talks with several NBA teams are in the works.