Ryan Smith traveled down to L.A. to see the NBA’s newest arena. What might he learn from the experience?

Ryan Smith and I had the same idea.

With the Jazz facing the Clippers for early-season NBA action, we both figured Sunday would be a great time to travel down (separately) to the Clippers' new arena, the Intuit Dome.

The relevance to the Jazz is obvious: Smith is spending over $500 million of taxpayer money to renovate the Delta Center in downtown Salt Lake City over the next few years, and it simply makes sense to see what the newest and shiniest NBA arena did to see if there’s anything to copy.

Ironically, the Intuit Dome took inspiration the other way around. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer liked the Delta Center’s stands “hugging” the court with steep sightlines, in sharp contrast to the way the bowl slopes further away from the court at the Clippers' previous home, now called Crypto.com Arena.

Smith and Ballmer spoke for several minutes courtside at the arena on Sunday, Ballmer showing off his stadium’s new design to the Jazz’s owner. Later, Jazz coach Will Hardy and general manager Justin Zanik joined the admiration party on the court.

I got my own tour of the arena from Clippers staff that day, and of course, experienced a game there. (The Jazz lost, 116-105.) Here’s what I learned — and the relevance it has to Utah’s own construction project.

A place for basketball

Perhaps my favorite part about the Intuit Dome is its love affair with basketball.

The arena complex — 26 acres in all — features five basketball courts: the main NBA floor, two dedicated practice courts for the Clippers, one court within the arena concourse that’s a near-replica of the Clippers' court, used for fan and employee events, and one outside the arena on the plaza where fans can simply shoot hoop or play pickup games. That last one is open to the public during normal hours, meaning fans can come and play organically, steps away from where their NBA heroes do.

The facility is full of basketball-oriented features. The upper bowl concourse (open air, a feat probably only possible in Los Angeles) has multiple high-tech pop-a-shot alleys for fans to shoot. Importantly for the Clippers, they have their own basketball arena merch stands, ones they don’t have to trade off with the Lakers on, like they did at the old Staples Center.

Highlighting the basketball theme is a Clipper ship — it looks like a pirate ship — outside the arena. It’s made of basketball hoops.

Finally, my favorite part of the concourse was the high school jersey wall. A brilliant idea from Clippers management, the team reached out to every high school in California, no matter how big or how small, and asked for a single jersey. With more than 1,500 jerseys in all, fans can find their alma mater on the walls of an NBA arena; a database accessible in-arena indicates exactly which section they can find their school’s jersey in.

Like a lot of Utahns, basketball was a huge part of my childhood. It obviously remains a huge part of my life now. To see these, and a bunch of other touches, spoke pretty deeply to me — and I hope that the Delta Center finds a way to retain a community feel.

The sloping, high-tech seats

Once you get inside the arena and game action begins, though, it’s pretty incredible how different the Intuit Dome is when compared to other arenas. At this point, I’ve gone to a game at every NBA arena. Unlike, say, baseball parks, which allow for a wide array of dimensions and features, NBA arenas are pretty darn similar to one another once you enter the game’s viewing area.

The one point of difference in the other 29 buildings tends to be whether or not a facility is a hockey-hybrid arena or a basketball-only arena. Those with hockey tend to have long, gently sloping baseline seats; you can sometimes even see people try to crane their necks so they can see the action over the rows of people in front of them. Meanwhile, basketball arenas have steeper seats that are higher up vertically but closer horizontally to the action. (For example, seats in Row 20 at the Intuit Dome are 45 feet closer to the court than at Crypto.com Arena, the Clippers' previous home.)

Intuit Dome is the exception. Three sides of it remind you of the Delta Center — and then there’s The Wall.

The Wall extends 51 rows up, uninterrupted. No suites, no upper or lower bowl, just a Wall of fans, extending to the ceiling.

The closest seats are intended to be the Clippers' supporters' section, which they call The Swell. There’s a standing bar in front of every seat in this section for the hardest core of fans; during the Jazz game, they chanted on nearly every play. (For instance, after Lauri Markkanen missed one free throw, they chanted “Do it again!” repeatedly for his second.)

Every seat in the arena has USB-C charging, plus a quadrant of four buttons in the armrest. Those are used for timeout games, displayed on a massive “Halo” video board that itself has 0.88 acres of screen real estate.

Each seat also has an LED light in the seat, which can turn red, blue, yellow, and green. The team uses these colors throughout the action: during the national anthem, red white and blue lights wave throughout the crowd. When a Clipper player makes a three, Clippers' red flashes upward through the arena. It’s a really cool effect.

It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the Delta Center renovations to copy what the Intuit Dome has done here. The point of the construction is to expand the seating area so that the arena can fit more fans in for a hockey configuration, making the tight-knit basketball setup seemingly impossible.

In previous interviews — the Jazz’s leadership declined to speak on the record for this story — Ryan Smith has spoken of new seating technology that he believes will allow the team to have good seating for both sports. That wasn’t on display at the Intuit Dome, as it didn’t need to be.

A tech billionaire dream, a privacy nightmare

By far the strangest part of the Intuit Dome experience was the facial recognition systems that power nearly every aspect of going to a game. In order to get into the arena, you have to download the Intuit Dome app, which then asks you to do a facial recognition scan and enter your payment information. At the entrance gate, cameras scan you, then check to see if you have tickets to the game. If you do, you’re let in.

The concession stands are all grab and go, and also operate on the same facial recognition technology. The cameras scan your face, then you grab popcorn or burgers or pizza or even sushi, then leave. The in-stand cameras keep track of what you’ve grabbed and charge your account for it. If you’d like to buy alcohol, you scan your California ID in the app.

This technology was glitchy, to be honest. For some people, it recognized them immediately. For others, they had to stoop down in front of the camera or move around for them to be recognized, which looked awkward. It is possible to skip the cameras, and use the Intuit Dome app for entry and concessions — but that meant fewer lines with longer waits. Fans without a phone, like children, have to go to a separate line first, where they get a wristband that allows them access to the arena and food.

And, of course, there are huge privacy concerns at play here. This level of data tracking has become widely embraced by the tech world, but regular people and cybersecurity experts alike have significant qualms about this much data being collected in the first place. Ballmer is clearly comfortable with it, and Smith’s track record at Qualtrics would indicate he is, too.

The players and coaches didn’t seem to mind. While the arena was probably half full during the Jazz’s game — a Chargers game at SoFi Stadium nearly across the street sapped some gamegoers, but the Clippers have yet to sell out their new home — the game’s participants still liked their experience in the building.

“It’s fire,” Keyonte George said. “Maybe they could get more fans. But The Wall, the lights, the court, the environment. What’s it called? Intuit? I’m very into it.”

As the Smith Entertainment Group releases more information on what they have planned for downtown Salt Lake City, we’ll see if they are into Intuit as much as George.

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