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On a warm day earlier this summer, I met Gillian Zucker, the CEO of Halo Sports and Entertainment, parent company of the Los Angeles Clippers, in the cool of the loading dock beneath the Intuit Dome, the team’s then-in-construction arena in Inglewood, California.
Overnight, news had broken that Paul George—the sweet-shooting perennial All-Star—would depart in free agency, joining the Philadelphia 76ers. George had joined the Clippers alongside fellow superstar Kawhi Leonard in 2019, and he’d helped lead the team to playoff appearances in four of his five seasons. It was, by any accounting, a serious blow to the team’s title hopes.
But the vibe at Intuit Dome that day was warm, buoyant, cheerily busy. The marketing team clustered around a folding table, finalizing plans for the season; hard-hatted construction workers buzzed around doing finishwork and installation. Sure, the team might look a little different than expected when the Clippers opened the doors for regular-season play at the arena—which will happen tomorrow, against Kevin Durant’s Phoenix Suns. But on this summer day there was work to be done: a stadium to finish and open, basketball to play, and fans to win over.
The arena is the brainchild of Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO who has owned the Clippers since 2014, when he paid a then-remarkable $2 billion to a disgraced Donald Sterling for control of the team. In the years since, he has distinguished himself in two primary ways: first, with his hair-on-fire cheering from his seat under the basket. And second, by sparing no expense to turn the Clippers—long the stepchild of Los Angeles basketball—into a world-class organization.
And there is no better symbol of the Clippers’ hoped-for change in status than their new arena, built at a rumored cost of more than $2 billion. From 1999 through last season, the Clippers shared the Crypto.com Arena (formerly Staples Center) with the Los Angeles Lakers. And the teams inhabited the building in different ways. For home games, the Clippers covered the Lakers’ 17 championship banners, while the Lakers had no such problem (the Clippers have never won a title, nor do any retired jerseys hang in their rafters). Even the look and feel of the games was different. “I would say the Lakers vibe is more like you're going to watch a show. Everywhere is dark, the stage is lit up,” Clippers guard Terance Mann told me. “And ours is more like a basketball game.”
For some players, that was the appeal. During his free agency, in 2019, Leonard was rumored to be a Lakers target before ultimately opting for the other Staples Center locker room. “I just wanted to go to a franchise where I could try to help build a legacy,” he told me this spring. (A knee injury will keep Leonard out for at least the season opener.)
And while the Intuit Dome represents an enormous step forward for what I’ll call the Clippers Experience, it’s unlikely that Leonard’s legacy-building games there will replicate the theatricality of a night with the LakeShow. But that’s not the point. Instead Ballmer has focused—manically—on the granular level of the fan experience to deliver a new sort of way to attend a basketball game. His initial plan, Zucker told me, was to name the arena the FanDome. A message inlaid in the concrete outside the entrance reads: “From one superfan to another, welcome to Intuit Dome —Steve.”
Start, say, with the humble trash can. I can’t summon the mental image of a single in-arena waste receptacle, and I bet you can’t either. But as we moseyed through the loading dock, Zucker pointed out a regiment of three-unit trash bins ready to be deployed throughout the building. Organics, she explained, go into one container, with a decal of a basketball rim running around it. A vinyl record encircles recycling. (Intuit Dome will host concerts too; Bruno Mars christened the place in August.) The rim, naturally, is true to size—the same dimensions as the one down on the court. The tops of the bins are slanted, to prevent patrons from leaving drinks on top of them. Zucker estimated that the team’s garbage czar (really its vice president of operations) tested something like 20 different styles of can before settling on this one.
A similar level of obsession plays out in the arena’s seating. The building itself is partially sunken into the ground, both because of FAA guidelines (LAX is down the road, and planes pass directly overhead) and to allow all fans, even ones in the nosebleeds, the dignified feeling of walking down from the concourse to their seats, rather than up. Those seats, too, were the subject of extensive testing. “I think that's where Steve spent the bulk of his time,” Zucker told me. “He obsessed over the bowl, over the legroom, over the width of the seat, over the comfort of the seat, over the pitch of the backrest. I don't even know how many seats he tested, but many, many, many, many.”
In fact, she went on, the team set up a series of grandstands on top of a nearby parking garage, where they erected tester seats they’d purchased in blocks of six—so as to be able to measure legroom, middle seat discomfort, and line of sight. Zucker recalled one early meeting with Ballmer and a representative from the building’s architecture firm. “They said, ‘Okay, Steve, do you want a really, really tight, energetic bowl or do you want comfort and legroom?’ And he said, ‘Yes,’” she recounted. “And they were like, ‘No, no, no. This is an either/or question.’ And he said, ‘I just hired the best architects in the world. Let's go.’" The result is what appears—to me, at least—to be an uncommonly intimate arena, its roughly 18,000 seats cantilevered as close to the court as possible.
And the seats Ballmer landed on are rather serious. They’re all powered, allowing fans to charge their phones, and an Eras Tour–style remote-controlled LED light is embedded into each armrest. Just above the LED sits a diamond of four polished metal buttons—positioned, per Ballmer’s Microsoft heritage, in the familiar layout of an Xbox controller. Those buttons will allow fans a new degree of engagement in traditional arena games like trivia contests and three-card monte. In order to allow them to truly participate, the Clippers contracted a company to design a gaming engine to power the scoreboard. In other words, where the typical arena jumbotron game is pre-recorded, its outcome already known, displays during breaks in the action at Intuit Dome will be powered by fans pushing their little buttons.
The jumbotron, by the way, is remarkable: a “Halo Board” stocked with a full acre of LEDs that encircles just about all of the arena. (For reference, it’s nearly five times larger than the era-defining scoreboard at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.) “I'm excited about the Halo Board,” shooting guard Norm Powell told me. “It's probably one of the most insane things I've ever seen in my life.”
The idea is to create a new sort of arenagoing experience—especially for fans cheering for the home team. The section of the bowl behind one basket has been designated The Wall: It’s an uninterrupted block of 51 rows—some 4,700 seats—earmarked for the team’s superfans, with the most intense ones functioning as a sort of college student section–slash–European soccer ultra bloc. The section is meant to house exclusively Clipper fans—aspiring Wall sitters will need to enroll in the team’s “Chuckmark” program (named for Chuck the Condor, the team’s mascot), to prove their fan bona fides. (They can also lose access to the Wall for indiscretions like cheering for the opposing team or wearing their jersey.)
The idea is to cater both to unattached basketball-watchers in LA, and to the dyed-in-the-wool Clipper fans who’ve spent the past few decades growing used to having a less-than-ideal arena experience. “For existing Clipper fans, what I would say is, they have earned this,” Zucker told me. There are not, I noted, a ton of casual Clipper fans. “They've been through a lot,” she agreed.
Center Ivica Zubac played his first two seasons with the Lakers before being traded across the arena in year three, giving him a sense of what, exactly, makes those Clipper fans different. “It's not the biggest fanbase in the league, but it's a very proud fanbase that will do anything to see their team win the championship, and they're behind you no matter what,” he said. “Those long-standing fans, they went through a lot of stuff with this team to be that loyal. To stick with the Clippers and be loyal to them, it means a lot to the players, and that's why I say I love playing here and representing them.”
Back in late April, I drove to Crypto.com for Game 2 in the Clippers’ first-round playoff matchup against Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving, and the Dallas Mavericks. I passed the arena’s “Star Plaza” (statues of 10 athletes and two broadcasters; zero Clippers representation unless you count Elgin Baylor, who served as a Clippers executive…after 11 All-Star appearances with the Lakers) and took my seat in press row, along the baseline. The Clips had won Game 1 handily, but couldn’t quite find a rhythm in a rock-fight Game 2—struggling, perhaps, to reincorporate Leonard, who had spent the previous three-plus weeks resting his surgically repaired knee. The Mavericks won, 96-93.
The game—choppy, marked by brief spurts of basketball wizardry from superstars Leonard, Paul George, and James Harden—was in some ways emblematic of the team’s season. The Clippers had traded for a disgruntled Harden just before the year started, and initially struggled to incorporate him and fellow Russell Westbrook, yet another LA native and future Hall of Famer, into the rotation. By December, though, the squad appeared to have jelled, logging a nine-game win streak and a stretch during which they won 16 of 19. In January, the enigmatic Leonard signed a three-year contract extension, with whispers that George would sign his own shortly thereafter. In October, the league consensus held, the Clippers could be a title contender if all went right—they certainly had among the league’s strongest concentration of talent. And by February’s All-Star break, LA’s second team sure seemed like its best.
But the team sputtered after the break, going just a game over .500. They entered the playoffs as the fourth seed in the Western Conference, but after taking Game 1 at Crypto over the Mavs, they lost four of the next five, ending their season. And then George—for whom the Clippers had traded the Oklahoma City Thunder a king’s ransom in 2019—decided to leave.
It was popular, on the sports-talk shows, to chuckle at the Clippers’ situation in the days that followed. They’d tried to assert their basketball supremacy, and here they were, announcing contracts for role players like Derrick Jones Jr. and Kris Dunn. Roughly, the ribbing went something like this: That’s what they get for trying to out-Laker the Lakers.
But spending some time around the team this spring and summer, I found myself thinking about the rather large gap that had opened between who the Clippers used to be and who they’d become. I grew up in Los Angeles; when my family went to basketball games, we went to see the Clippers, since tickets to Laker games were so much more expensive. The team in those days was a trainwreck: I remember the middling point guard Pooh Richardson, and not much else. We bought tickets based primarily on our interest in the visiting team, and I know we weren’t alone in doing so.
Things changed somewhat in the early aughts, when the Clippers boasted a roster of hyperathletic and insanely cool young players—the sort capable of generating one of the coolest covers in magazine history. Players like Lamar Odom, who in his pre-Kardashian-Kast-Member years was a breathtakingly skilled ball-handling forward. Corey Maggete. Elton Brand. And Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson, who threw each other alley-oops, celebrated by bumping both fists against their foreheads. (The two now host a podcast called Knuckleheads.)
Indeed, those were the teams that the current Clippers cited to me when I asked for their strongest memories of the franchise. “I just remember Quentin Richardson, Darius Miles, Lamar Odom,” said Kawhi Leonard, who grew up in Riverside, some 75 miles east of the Intuit Dome.
“Corey Maggette, Quentin Richardson, Darius, all those guys, man. Lamar Odom when he was here,” Terance Mann recalled. “They were gritty, they were hard-nosed players. It was just dope to be able to see those guys start their career here and take it to a new level. They were dressing the part—they were following, like, the Allen Iverson wave of headbands, arm sleeves, tattoos, cool sneakers.”
Those Clippers, Quentin Richardson told me, embraced the fact that LA was the Lakers’ city. “We're the little brothers in the town, because Shaq and Kobe are in the midst of a three-peat,” he recalled. “We took pride in still carving out our own little corner of the town that was rocking with us.” As Darius Miles reminded me, their Clippers were beloved in part because the team engaged with the town in a unique way. “We used to be at places where you would never see a Lakers player,” he said. “We was doing most of our community work in the projects. We used to be at the mall all the time. We used to be at high school games. We used to be at colleges. The Lakers, you’d just see them on TV—you really didn't see them out.”
Things were by all accounts grimmer behind the scenes. Longtime owner Donald Sterling ran the team with a wrinkled, problematic fist, often bringing guests to ogle “my players” in the locker room after games. (This period is depicted in the recent FX series Clipped.)
But since Ballmer took over, in 2014, he has presided over something like a deep cleaning. The team he took over was the “Lob City” edition—Chris Paul flinging alley-oops galore to Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan. Ballmer oversaw the end of that era, and the beginning of the current George-Leonard one, all the while preparing to give the Clippers their own proper home: Zucker was hired in 2014 with no expectation that the team would build an arena, but the following year the team had begun discussing what would become Intuit Dome. The players have enjoyed the process. “Everything since I've been here, what the Clippers did is next level,” Ivica Zubac said. “Not a lot of teams in the league are investing that much, putting in all their efforts and resources into getting a team better from every aspect.”
And while the Clippers have struggled to make it past the second round of the playoffs during Ballmer’s tenure, the team hasn’t finished under .500 on his watch either—an underappreciated turnaround for a team that sports-media mogul Bill Simmons (a longtime season ticket holder) described in 2009 as “cursed for 33 consecutive years.”
The question, ultimately, isn’t: Can the Clippers outshine the Lakers? That’s a fool’s errand. Instead, it’s more like: Can the Clippers carve out an identity of their own—one that’s tied to winning? And it seems to me that the Intuit Dome isn’t the final step in that process. Instead, Intuit Dome is step one: a massive stride out of the Lakers’ shadow, and a home for fans new and old. Table stakes, really, for the work of identity construction.
And while you might need multiple superstars to win an NBA championship, all you need to build loyalty with a city is a roster full of players with whom fans feel a connection—and a place they’re excited to call home. “I never in a million years would've thought the Clippers would have the best arena in the NBA,” Miles told me. And yet: here they are. All that’s left to do is to start filling the rafters with blue-and-red banners.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographed by Glen Luchford
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Donald Long
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina & Ksenia Golub
