United Center - Chicago Blackhawks

United Center – Chicago Blackhawks



Convenience/Access – Pretty good. Not NYC/DC good, but in the city, accessible easily by subway, and a quick cab ride from anywhere near downtown.

Location/Scene – You have to walk a decent distance to get to any bars/scene. Obviously its great that you can even walk to stuff, but for a big city arena, it could be surrounded by more stuff.

Outside Appearance – Completely badass, imposing, and unique. The UC eschewed the glass, steel, and redbrick look that most all newer rinks have gone for. It’s a great looking building, and on a cold gray Chicago winter day, perfectly fitting.

Inner Aesthetics – In general, bigger, multi-sport buildings tend to slip in this category. More seats and more space seems to necessarily imply that the look of the whole place will suffer. Chicago isn’t perfect in this regard, but its pretty decent. The seats are nice deep red, and the boxes aren’t that obtrusive. The massive steepness gives the place a very Montreal-esque feel, with the high press box and upper level seats. While they apparently exist, the out-of-town scoreboards are incredibly hard to find, and are miniscule. This is a major, major flaw in our book.

Concourse – An outstanding score here. Both upper and lower levels are wide, clean, and have more than enough stands, places to hover, tables, and tv screens. Doesn’t really get much better than this.

Sightlines – It’s a huge building, and steep, so the uppers are really, really far away. The sightlines are fine, as they should be in any modern arena. The top sections behind the nets suffer from the common issue of all fans leaning forward and obstructing any rows behind them- meaning everyone has to lean once the first few rows do.

Bathrooms – There are enough of them. The lines are short. They are clean. The game broadcast is piped in. A+.

Concessions – Fair enough prices, a lot of variety, local offerings. The negative would be that the food we sampled wasn’t very good.

Fans/Atmosphere – This category gets more and more fruitless as we go along, and the United Center is a perfect reason why. The overall atmosphere just depends too much on the given game or season or period in the team’s history you happen to hit. Way too subjective. Anyway, our initial and joint visit here was attended by maybe 6000 people. Just totally empty. And like Boston, we figured that with a packed house, and a good team, this place had all the ingredients to be rocking. Well, the second visit came on an opening Saturday night after a conference finals trip the year before, and the atmosphere was as blah as you can have in an arena populated by 20+k fans. The game presentation and feel is fantastic- no music, all organ, minimal nonsense. However to be completely fair and honest, this arena falls well below expectations in the overall atmosphere category.

History/Banners – A very impressive display of championship banners and retired numbers for both Chicago franchises. Lined up orderly in a square pattern on all 4 sides. Lots of small homages on the concourse and frequent scoreboard tidbits of past greats. Dominant use of red/black. Good stuff.

Bars – Quite a few of them, and with a nice setup where people aren’t lined up 4 deep. Friendly bartenders, good pours, and acceptable prices.

Store – To accompany the myriad stores and kiosks and Hawkquarters that dot downtown, the stores in the arena are very good All three of us own Hawk name/number shirts, acquired in three different ways.

Value – We paid 8 dollars for student tickets a few years ago. Those days are over. The value of tickets isn’t bad at all, while we’d say the value in the arena is good.

Overall – Making a second visit to a place really does give you some perspective. Without a second trip, this rink was probably pegged as a nice, clean, modern arena with some excellent traits and a few major drawbacks that could be easily overlooked. Not top-tier, but close to it. The second trip, for EP and JP, accentuated the really cool features (exterior, concourse, the feeling that you're in Chicago) but also didn’t do much to boost the bad- slightly sterile, a bland atmosphere, middle of the pack aesthetics/sightlines from your seat. A good rink, a good value, and a good city.

#12: Verizon Center (DC)

Welcome to the Verizon Center writeup. Strangely, this is one of the few arenas where the three of us haven't attended the same game together. Surely that will change soon. On with the analysis:

Fans/Atmosphere

Anyone who last visited the Verizon Center before spring 2008 doesn't know the Verizon Center. The first time I went back I didn't know the Verizon Center. This city, and the stadium along with it, has undergone a significant transformation. New fans are engaged and buying season tickets in droves. (Surely the perennial awfulness of the once-mighty Redskins has hurried the transformation.) Gone are the days when you could hear a pin drop in the stadium. No longer do playoff games fail to sell out, or do weeknight games draw fans in the four digits. I went to a weeknight preseason game this year that had more fans in attendance than the 2003 playoff games against division rival Tampa Bay.

The crowd is engaged for a full 60 minutes, rising and falling not just when two-time MVP Ovechkin touches the puck, but also when Backstrom, Semin, and Green get going. This is surely due in part to astute ownership of Ted Leonsis, who made the decision not only to let the team get bad so the team could get really good, but also to change the in-game presentation. An arena that once catered to children now caters more towards hockey fans. It's not perfect - the "hockey song," one of the worst things to happen to hockey since the glowing puck, still occasionally gets played. But there are fewer songs played in general and almost no manufactured claps and cheers. These days, the fans take care of that.

Perhaps most telling of all, the city has developed a highly educated fan base. Yes, this should have happened before Alex Ovechkin played in his third NHL season. But at least it happened. Fans no longer ask questions like "Where did we get that guy Robert Lang?" Nowadays, people know Mike Knuble's career stats even before he arrives in DC, and they know all about Brendan Morrison's wonky knees. More telling, the fans know about guys like Oscar Osala and Tyler Sloan and the backup goalies in Hershey. Like I said, things have changed.

Convenience/Access & Location/Scene

The Verizon Center is the cream of the crop when it comes to this category. This was the case even before Chinatown, the neighborhood where the stadium is located, sprouted into what is now snobbishly known as the "Penn Quarter." The area is serviced by its own metro stop, which is directly under the arena. And if you're the kind that likes to drive to a game - especially if you're one of the many recent converts living in the Virginia suburbs - this is the best stadium in the league in terms of traffic. It's easy to leave the stadium because there is no single entrance or exit. You walk about 5 minutes to wherever you found metered parking and take your choice of half a dozen routes home. It couldn't be easier.

There are no fewer than 75 restaurants and bars within a 3-block radius of the stadium, and these run the gamut from fast food to local establishments to extremely upscale restaurants with name chefs. Want to see a movie after the game? Go to the theater connected to the stadium. Feel like bowling? Check out alley in the building attached. And if you bring your girlfriend, she can get spa treatment inside the stadium. You can send erudite non-hockey fans across the street to the newly renovated Shakespeare Theater. Former owner Abe Polin was prescient when he moved the stadium from the Maryland suburbs to downtown DC. All he did was change the landscape and social fabric of the city.

Outside Appearance

There's nothing superb here and the arena probably loses points in this department. The VC isn't tacky or difficult to look at but rather looks like a giant office building. In that way, it fits in the neighborhood. But the builders could have made things more interesting.

Sightlines/Seating Bowl

It's easy to criticize the view from the seating bowl if you've only seen a game from the top row of the upper deck directly behind the goals. This is an area called the "Eagle's Nest," and it formerly featured $5 tickets back in Ovechkin's first and second year. (Incidentally, Eagle's Nest tickets are probably the single best deal in the NHL since the lockout. See the game's greatest goal scorer in his rookie season for $5? Yes please.) But the problem with the Eagle's Nest is that you need better than eagle-vision to see from those seats. They are far from the ice.

Pretty much any other seat in the upper deck is a good one, and the corners in particular are superb for upper level seats. The arena is well-lit, unlike those in Tampa and St. Louis, which make you feel like you're entering a haunted house. The light gray-blue seats aren't as interesting as Pittsburgh's multi-hued seats, but they do provide a blank canvas that's easy on the eyes - especially when everyone sitting in those seats is covered in red. (Before the recent transformation, the blue colored seats readily revealed the team's poor attendance.) The press box resides in the upper corner where the opposing team shoots twice, and there have been few complaints from the press about a nosebleed vantage point, as there are in many other new stadiums.

The Verizon Center seating bowl fails in two ways. First, the ring of club-level seats outpaces fans' desire to sit in those seats. The problem is in the stadium's marketing: fans must purchase club-level seats for every event at the VC, not just hockey games. So a diehard Wizards fan who wants rich man's seats doesn't attend 41 Caps games a year. (Of course, the Caps being the hottest team in town lately, this trend has probably shifted the other way, with club-level ticketholders abandoning Wizards games.) Second, the layout of the lower deck ensures that some seats on the far corners are far from the ice. These seats dont provide a good vantage point and can even be obstructed in the far same-side corner. I would prefer to sit in the last row of the upper deck at dead center ice than in some of the lower level corners. And that's a problem, because the lower corners are significantly more expensive than the center uppers. So fans there are getting the short end of it.

History/Banners

In a recurring theme, the Caps recently raised all-new banners to go along with the team's attempt to brand the entire stadium red. These banners are simple, plain, and quite attractive. The old blue and gold banners did not work, especially the retired number banners that featured the likenesses of Rod Langway, Dennis Maruk, and Dale Hunter in gold on a blue background. No one wants to see your ugly mugs.

That said, no analysis can be complete without mentioning that the Verizon Center features the second-biggest joke among banners hanging in NHL stadiums, honoring the WNBA's Washington Mystics three championships. You ask, "Surely these banners honor actual championship wins, right?" Incorrect. They honor the Mystics attendance championships. This is an utter embarassment. No team should cater to a part-time tenant in such a shameful way. Or, they should take the banners down during every stadium event that is not women's basketball. I have seen only one worse banner, in Florida, where they honor Celine Dion's multiple sellout performances that opened up stadium. (Yay! Three concert sellouts!) But the attendance championship banners are far worse than the 7th man banner in Nashville or banners in some stadiums honoring #1 fans.

Concourse/Concessions/Cool Stuff

The stadium loses points here. The concourse, while not boring, offers nothing unique. It's not the fire hazard like Mellon Arena or Nassau Coliseum, but it pales compared to the excellent and interesting concourses in Columbus, Denver, and Philadelphia. And the bathrooms are just crowded enough to make you want to hold it until the end of the game.

The concessions are improving. You can now purchase bbq, Chinese food, Dunkin Donuts, and other interesting cuisines. But the prices are too high ($10 mini-pizzas) and the lines often obstruct the walkways.

There isn't nearly enough cool stuff for a team celebrating its 35th anniversary in the league. How about replicas of Ovechkin's Hart and Pearson trophies? A showcase of the 1998 Stanley Cup run? An exhibit about the team in the 1990s, when Bondra, Pivonka, and Ridley (three of my favorite Caps players of all time) ran the show? A history of the team's coaches? Famous quotes on the wall? Peter Bondra was one of the most exciting players in the league and scored 4 goals in a game twice, both at home. But if you walked around the stadium you'd never know it.

Bars

I dont care about this category. Unlike my 30-30 bretheren, I don't booze much at games. It's too expensive, and especially at the Verizon Center there are too many good places to drink before and after games. But the bars in the stadium have changed for the better. The upstairs, which formerly was the redheaded stepchild of NHL upper concourses, features a bar with dozens of beers. Both concourses have multiple bars where you can stand in a very short line to overpay for liquor. JP and CC, drink to your heart's content.

Store

The Verizon Center features a better-than-average store. There are dozens of Caps shirts, about 50 selections of hats, and lots of toys for kids. The prices are pretty brutal, though. But one thing it has going for it are tons of player name and number tees. If you want a David Steckel #39 shirt - and you should - it can be yours.

Value

This is a difficult category to assess. Just try to buy tickets to a weekend game from the box office. You can't do it. And the Capitals ticketing department has poached some of the best ticket salespeople in the business, including folks from the Flyers, such that the team sells out most games including those against some of the most boring division rivals in hockey. (Florida Panthers on a Tuesday night? The average fan would rather slog through a congressional subcommittee hearing.) Interestingly, the team marks up the face value far beyond the season ticket holder cost. Weekend tickets in the upper corners, for instance, retail for $60, but the team charges season ticket holders only $25. Contrary to what you might expect, this disparity has created an excellent secondary ticket market - the ticket holder can sell for more than his purchase price, the buyer can buy for way less than face value, and everyone walks away happy. Aside from that, you're paying to watch one of the most exciting teams in the league. So if the question is whether this is great value, the answer is an unequivocal yes; comparable teams charge far more and have far stingier secondary markets. But we defy you to get your hands on lower bowl tickets at center ice for less than $120 apiece.

Overall

This is a clean, attractive stadium with a solid game presentation, and the best location of any stadium in the U.S. It loses some points on some of the physical stuff - outer appearance, concourse, bathrooms. But what it lacks in those categories it more than makes up for in excitement and passion. With a good team, this is as exciting a place as any in the league to catch a game.