My NBA Experience

I went to an NBA game with my cousins this past Saturday. It was a lot of fun. Here are the most memorable parts of my experience.

Advertising

The advertising at an NBA game is like a parody of itself. Every timeout, of which there are many, is a KeyBank™ or RedBull™ timeout, ripe with the chance to win a $50 KeyBank™ sponsored gift card, or a RedBull™ coupon or something. These gift cards and coupons would literally descend on us from onhigh, floating gently down on little parachutes, giving the impression that KeyBank is located in heaven.

Before the game had even started, two large King Soopers™ blimps were aggressively flying around the stadium, casting King Soopers™ shadows over the audience. Every free throw is a Sierra Mist™* free throw. What does that even mean? The scoreboard, the banner encircling the court, any downtime whatsoever -- if you could fit an ad into some unit of spacetime, it was already there, desperate for your attention. The stadium itself was called the Pepsi Center, for God's sake. It was too much.

Refreshments

Pricing of food and drinks at these things always surprises me. I don't know why, I mean it makes sense for the NBA staff to confisicate my water bottle (which they did) so they can charge over 500% normal price for a can of soda (which they did, whistling a merry tune while doing so). I'm not being sarcastic. The NBA makes a lot of money doing this, and people are okay with it. Probably excited for the chance to recoup the massive amount of money they will inevitably spend on popcorn and soda by winning a KeyBank™ gift card!

We bought one Mountain Dew™ and one Gatorade™. The vendor took the caps off for us before we even got to touch them, then hid the caps away in some unseeable void. The reason all drinks had to be uncapped was because apparently people had been throwing the caps onto the court, and it had become a big problem.

I found this a little strange, because if you want to throw a cap, and then someone takes the cap from you, don't you still have a Sierra Mist ™ bottle you can throw? Like, if someone really wants to throw something, taking the cap from them doesn't seem like it will fix much. Listen, NBA: Either you tell your valued customer to cup their hands and then you spray the Sierra Mist™ right in there from a hose, or you don't sell drinks at all.

Oh yeah, I forgot the second option is ridiculous because it doesn't make you any money.

Employees

All the employees seemed incredibly sad, tired, and unmotivated. It was not a good atmosphere for them, mindlessly collecting tickets and standing there, or watching for security concerns, while a lot of other people have fun. It occurred to me that their situation is still much, much better than the workers who assemble iPads, and I think about those iPad workers less, yet I use my iPad more. (I don't actually have an iPad, but you didn't know that. Err, until now. Stop asking so many stupid questions.)

The Game Itself

Nuggets down by 6-24 by 10 minutes and it did not get much better from there. Nuggets were not good that night. Still, I really enjoyed watching the talent and athleticism of the away team (Clippers).

I'd never seen the NO ONE SITS UNTIL WE SCORE thing before. It took a long time for the Nuggets to score, so I got this funny image in my head (as I'm sure everyone there did) of a group of exhausted Nuggets fans standing for two hours while increasingly demoralized Nuggets players attempted worse and worse shots. I guess most people did sit down before the Nuggets scored during a timeout. (I didn't.)

Overall, I really did enjoy the experience. But KeyBank™ sucks.**






*Sorry, I don't actually know when using ™ is appropriate. I even tried to look it up on Google™. Forgive me, all you Trademark experts who read my blog.
**Yeah! Take that, KeyBank!