Post#523 » by BMatt07 » Tue Jun 12, 2018 5:37 pm
Just got back from a tour of the new arena, I was blown away by how nice it was.
The concourses are completely open, so you can see the court from the concession stands. It's not like the current BMO where you have to walk through those narrow concrete hallways to get to the concession stands and then you can't see the court. It's a great quality of life improvement. The concourses also seemed to be about at least 2x the width of those in the BMO, it's so much more open. The color scheme inside looked very modern with the black and white stone everywhere, it looked really good.
There are TV's everywhere in the concourses, almost to a comedic level. They looked very nice though.
We didn't get to sit in the seats in the lower or upper bowl, but the seats looked comfortable, and had cupholders.
We did get to sit in the leather suite seats, and they were very comfortable, plenty of leg room. No cupholders.
Our guide took us to the upper level to what he deemed to be the worst seat in the building, and the view was still great. Walking down to your seat up top was also very nice, climbing the upper deck stairs up to your seat in the BMO sucks.
You can definitely tell there's less seats in the new building, our guide said there's about 1,200 less seats. As a result however, all of the seats feel like they're so much closer to the court.
The screen hanging over the court is absolutely monstrous. Unfortunately it was turned off at the time of our tour so we didn't get to see it in action.
There seemed to be quite a bit of Johnson Controls branding throughout the arena. They had a sponsored entrance, suite / club, and lower bowl seating. All of the workers had Johnson Control vests and gloves. Take that for what's it's worth. I asked our guide about naming rights, and he didn't say a peep lol.
There's going to be a pro-shop on the main level that is going to be open year round. We didn't get to see it however.
It's such an improvement over the BMO, it's crazy.