#7

TD BankNorth Garden – Boston Bruins

Convenience/Access – Right on top of the main train station and some subway lines. Directly off of the highway. About as good as it gets.

Location/Scene – The location is fine, although a tiny notch below the gold standard of NY/WAS. There is plenty of activity around the Garden although it is in the city of Boston, which detracts points. No one ever said we were unbiased.

Outside Appearance – A huge square box with a slightly cool curved roof atop it. Its relatively unique looking, which is good.

Inner Aesthetics – If you cant tell by now, we love color-matching seats. Especially when you have distinctive colors like black and yellow, and when those colors win out over an equally historic NBA co-tenant’s, extra points. But the view of this rink from your seat is terrific. Beyond the yellow, the setup is good, the boxes are unobtrusive, the LED boards aren’t out-of-hand, and the ceiling is low.

Concourse – Compared to some other cookie-cutter rinks, the concourse here feels small, and somewhat sparse. Totally uninteresting one way or the other.

Sightlines – Good. We sat in the last row of the place in the corner, and we loved the view. The rink feels small and steep.

Concessions – This is another rink that fell very early on the trip, before we would make it a point to scour the entire rink for its food offerings. We did enjoy the decent prices and plentiful dunkin donuts stands.

Fans/Atmosphere – Again- our game was during the very lean years for the Bruins. The crowd was small and provided zero intimidation for the plentiful Isles fans there. Now it has obviously turned around 180 degrees, however we will note that even during the game we were at, we noted that with a good team, the TDBNG had the potential to be a sick scene. Boston’s a good sports city, what can we say.

History/Banners – Fan-fucking-tastic. Awesomely displayed, tasteful, and as unique as we’ve seen (the circular B logo, ful-name ones for the bruins, the very small, checkerboard ones for the Celts. There were statues of past greats around the arena. Tons of points here.

Cool Stuff – Of all the things it has going for it, this category isn’t one of them.

Bars – Or this one.

Store – A very good store with good prices. One of the first places we saw to carry non-superstar name and number shirts. Random note: many years ago during a visit here, JP bought a small box of ground up parquet floor from the old Garden. I think I lost it.

Value – No good at all on the tickets. For the state of the team at the time, we should not have spent 50 bucks on the worst seats in the house for a Bruins Isles game. The concessions and store were slightly better than we expected.

Overall – This rink tops the list of ones that we want to return to. Mostly because we have a feeling it may rank even higher when we do. This place dhas a ton of the things we all like in a rink, and hardly any of what we don’t. Even situated in this b.s. city, we all give TDBNG high marks, with the footnote that they may even be too low.