#16

Phillips Arena - Atlanta Thrashers

Convenience/Access - Its right in downtown Atlanta (whatever the hell that even means) and easy to walk to from much of the city. There was plenty of parking, including a massive garage that we mistook for the rink for about 5 minutes.

Location/Scene - Inside the CNN center which is basically a fancy mall. There wasn't much of a scene but there were a lot of people milling around.

Outside Appearance - Very nice. Lots of windows and a cool "Atlanta" sculpture on the front. The outside look sort of masks how giant this building is inside.

Inner Aesthetics - One of the only real unique layouts in the league here- all of the luxury boxes and club seats are stacked on one side of the ice. They themselves look nice, but overall this gives the whole inside an odd look when you're sitting across from them. The look of the seating bowl and seats themselves is decidedly average. Light blue dividers between glass panes is nice. Gray steel steps and barriers visible everywhere is not.

Concourse - Probably the biggest concourse we've ever seen in an indoor stadium. Big enough to have a nice, multi-story lobby in the front. Big enough to have the old scoreboard from the Omni (sweet) sitting there and not look overly big. There is a ton going on out here- stores, food, non-sports shops, a million televisions, and nooks and areas that seem like they've never been discovered. There is no denying that it's a really nice concourse but we all agree that the overall impression becomes a bit too much. Also, on the upper level, due to the aforementioned layout of the luxury boxes, you cant make a 360 degree lap around the arena. This is a major, major ding to us.

Sightlines - The upper seats are pretty far away. Once more, nothing of note to report here.

Bathrooms - Big and clean. They were definitely used thoroughly by at least 2 of us.

Concessions - Everything you could possibly want, it really does remind you of a mall food court. Quality was good.

Fans/Atmosphere - We aren't going to pile on Atlanta here. They have had it really rough. But even with Philly (and a lot of their fans) in town, there was nothing in the atmosphere here to warrant a positive or even condescendingly upbeat comment.

History/Banners - The Thrashers have no history, but the Hawks banners were awesome.

Cool Stuff - Let's see. There's the aforementioned scoreboard. Tons of TVs with other games from around the league on (something we haven't seen enough of across the trip). Two bird head type structures dangle from the ceiling and spew fire whenever the Thrash do something good like score (or, presumably, win). But its unlikely anything will ever approach the cool factor of stumbling (literally) into a random (and giant) room somewhere just off the concourse to find boxes of Hawks promotional items. It's generous to count this in the arena's overall favor, but damn right we are going to.

Bars - There were certainly tons of them, but we were too busy combing the bowels of this mega-concourse to be distracted by them.

Store - The store here is excellent and had the largest amount of off-the-rack player customized jerseys we've seen outside of Buffalo. This store spawned the most absurd impulse purchases of the trip when Justin and Mike simply could not resist 40 dollar Hawks jerseys. There are multiple stands where you can bring a jersey and get it professionally stitched right there.

Value - We paid well under 40 dollars to see an NHL game and an NBA game in a nice building in a span of 18 hours. Win.

Overall - Here is where we start to see the difficulty in ranking these places. Phillips is a sweet building. It is has a lot of quirks and is clean and easy to get to. But as a place to watch a hockey game, we all agreed that it is overwhelmingly bland. Juxtaposing those 2 things is hard to explain, but you'll have to trust us.