Ten years ago this week, the NBA approved the sale of the LA Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, officially ending a chapter in franchise history that saw Donald Sterling own the team for 33 years. One of the reasons Ballmer was excited about the Clippers was that the team had played its home games at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles since 1999.
“When I took over the team, I was very pleased that I didn’t have to build an arena – seriously,” Ballmer said last month. “Because every other team I looked at, whether it was Seattle for a while, Sacramento maybe moved to Seattle, which the league couldn’t do. Whether it was Milwaukee, they all needed arenas.”
“This is the time when teams could sell. I said, ‘That’s great. I have a team. It’s in LA and I don’t have to build an arena.’ All good.”
Ballmer learned the complications of the Clippers’ arrangement in downtown Los Angeles. The Clippers were the third team in the building, one of the busiest in the world. They trailed the Los Angeles Kings and Los Angeles Lakers in annual scheduling priority, putting the Clippers at a logistical disadvantage.
“Six months later? We have to build an arena,” Ballmer said.
The new Clippers arena is finally ready for its grand opening. The Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, will host its first event Thursday night with the first of two nights of shows featuring Grammy-winning recording artist Bruno Mars. There will be a ribbon cutting and red carpet before Mars takes the stage for a three-hour show.
The $2 billion arena, construction of which began in September 2021, has features that make it immediately eye-catching.
The building’s exterior is designed to look like a basketball net. The scoreboard, called the “Halo Board,” is the first of its kind in an NBA arena. The seating along the baseline of the visitors’ benches is “The Wall,” 51 straight rows with no suites designed to create a noise atmosphere rivaling the league’s most hostile arenas.
The Intuit Dome has five basketball courts, including the team’s practice courts and facilities.
But the most important aspect of the Intuit Dome’s opening and existence is the NBA schedule. The 2024-25 schedule will also be released Thursday, and the Clippers will officially open the regular season at their new home on Oct. 23 against the Pacific Division rival Phoenix Suns.
It is one of nine nationally televised Clippers games in the 2024–25 season, excluding NBA TV.
“We have to build our house,” Ballmer said in July, explaining how important it is for the Clippers to have their own arena. “We have to bring the energy to our house. We don’t want to play too many Monday nights against Monday Night Football. We don’t want to have so many Saturday games. We don’t want to have to cover up other guys’ banners to make it feel at least a little bit like our house.”
“It has to be our house. It took me six months to go from ‘Oh, we don’t have to build one’ to ‘Oh, we’re going to build one.'”
Last regular season, the Clippers had ten matinee home games in which they went 5-5 and trailed by double digits at each point. The team’s home schedule for the 2024-25 season currently does not include matinee games; all home games on the schedule will begin no earlier than 6 p.m. local time. The only time the Clippers had a home schedule without an afternoon start in the team’s 25 years of playing downtown was in the 2000-01 season.
Speaking of the Grammys, the Clippers and Lakers have often had to be rescheduled for a long winter tour because of the Grammy Awards in downtown LA. The Clippers once had an 11-game tour in 2011, with 24 days between home games. While the Clippers are on the road next season before the Grammy Awards, it’s only a four-game tour.
The Clippers’ longest road trip is seven games after the All-Star break, but two of those games will be a mini-series against the Lakers. The Clippers are currently scheduled to meet every other Western Conference opponent at least once before facing the Lakers for the first time next season.
The Clippers are the latest team to enter a new arena with a new brand identity, something 15 other teams have done when moving into their current arenas.
But this is also a transition period for the Clippers. While the roster still includes All-NBA forward Kawhi Leonard and former NBA MVP James Harden, the team parted ways with All-Star forward Paul George and former NBA MVP Russell Westbrook this offseason.
George will return with the Philadelphia 76ers on November 6 to face the Clippers to conclude a five-game home series, while Westbrook is scheduled to visit with the Denver Nuggets on December 1.
LA has signed players such as forward Derrick Jones Jr., forward Nicolas Batum and defenseman Kris Dunn.
According to league sources, the Clippers are preparing for the possibility that forward PJ Tucker will also be on the team when the season begins. Tucker is in the final year of his contract and while the Clippers have considered trading him, roster spots are filled around the league, making a deal before training camp unlikely.
Ballmer wanted to open the Intuit Dome with a championship, but the Clippers have shown over the past three years that they are nowhere near that goal. They have failed to win a playoff series since the franchise’s lone Conference Finals appearance in 2021. Ballmer hopes that the Clippers will get an arena built specifically for the team for the first time in franchise history, which would be another step toward an elusive Finals appearance.
“There was a classic TV commercial about Avis rental cars,” Ballmer said. “‘We’re Avis. We’re number two, but we try harder.’ We don’t have championships. We don’t. And we’re going to try harder. We’re going to work harder. We’re going to do what we can in every way, for our fans and for our team.”
Required reading
(Photo: Brian Rothmuller / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
