Inside the NBA arena that's trying to change how fans cheer

The Los Angeles Clippers' Intuit Dome rewards fans for passion — and boasts more technology (and toilets) than anywhere else.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Inside what may be the world’s most technologically advanced stadium, one of the clearest indications that things are different is heard in its restrooms. 

Unlike many professional sports stadiums that pipe audio of the game broadcast into restroom speakers, Intuit Dome, the brand-new home of the Los Angeles Clippers, plays a different soundtrack for fans using its more than 1,100 touchless toilets and urinals: pop music. 

The choice was intentional. Although Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft chief executive who has owned the Clippers since 2014, designed the $2 billion arena to include bells and whistles, he primarily wanted a place for exuberantly passionate fans of basketball, like him. To create that, incentives intended to get fans “back to their damn seats,” as Ballmer once said, were baked into the design — including, but not limited to, a lack of restroom play-by-play. 

Los Angeles Clippers chairman Steve Ballmer during construction of the arena in March 2023.Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images fileThe result is an arena with ambitions as lofty as the franchise’s dreams of winning a first NBA championship. Intuit Dome wants to rewire fans’ habits and change the way they’re used to rooting for the home team.“It feels kind of like an NBA Disneyland, versus [Crypto.com Arena, the Clippers’ former home, shared with the Los Angeles Lakers] where it’s a multiteam, multisport arena,” said Oscar Burrows-Rangel, a longtime Clippers fan. “This is dedicated to basketball, and everywhere you look, you know you’re at a basketball game. You know you’re at a basketball arena. You know you’re here for the game.”

Across professional sports, the game can feel secondary as teams court the spending of more casual fans. Wide-open concourses with views of the court encourage wandering. When the Phoenix Suns finished their $240 million home arena renovation in 2021, they added what has been described as the largest sports bar in Arizona, a 60-foot-long bar in one corner of the concourse, overlooking the court. State Farm Arena, in Atlanta, houses a bar accessible to its highest-paying customers that sits on the arena’s literal hardwood floor, only feet from the benches. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/nba/nba-intuit-dome-clippers-technology-rcna179023

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