Barclays Center has been the home of the Brooklyn Nets since the 2012-2013 NBA season. The New York Islanders will begin playing their home games there during the 2015-2016 season. Barclays Center is also host to a number of pre- and post-season college basketball tournaments; and it recently surpassed Madison Square Garden as the stadium with the highest non-sports revenue in the United States, because of the high demand for arts and entertainment in New York City.
This is the final post in a two-part series about the venue hosts of the 2015 NBA All-Star Weekend. The first post on Madison Square Garden discussed five stadium qualities for the newly renovated arena. While Madison Square Garden will hold the All-Star Game, itself, Barclays Center will host practically every other event this weekend, including the BBVA Compass Rising Stars Challenge and State Farm Saturday Night that features the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest and Foot Locker Three-Point Contest. While the sport of basketball will be the spectacle this weekend, let’s break down the Barclays Center based on the same five key areas that we examined in our Madison Square Garden review.
Wireless Connectivity:
As we have previously highlighted, Barclays Center is one of the most technologically advanced sports arenas, in terms of wireless capacity and connectivity. Their free Wi-Fi service is one of the best in the industry, with two 1-GB circuits. Typically, stadiums only need one, but the other is a backup circuit that prevents lost connections. Over half of those in attendance are free to troll the web and make calls with minimal disruption. Through 4,000 Ethernet jacks, Cisco provides the “Connected Stadium” network, which houses practically all the technological features necessary for Barclays Center’s day-to-day operations in one system.
Connectivity Grade: A
Design:
The Nets’ arena, designed by AECOM and SHoP Architects, has a very unique, Brooklyn-esque architecture. The façade is composed of 12,000 protective weathering steel panels, designed to look like the typical brownstone buildings of the burrow. The exterior, also, has a striking built-in oculus that defines the arena, serves as a meeting point, and shows various images and videos.
Furthermore, the building’s first level is below ground. This makes the delivery of goods and services much easier. As I’ll talk about later, the building’s new transit facility built right on the corner makes it one of the easiest venues in America to access. Also, the simple fact of being in Barclays Center has raised Nets’ home game attendance from dead last in the Association during the 2011-2012 season to 16th during the 2012-2013 season, when they moved from East Rutherford.
While the interior of the arena is very high-tech and aesthetically pleasing, it suffers from a fatal flaw. The floor layout was only built to be big enough for basketball games, so some of the seats in the lower bowl need to be removed during hockey games. Because of this, the seating configuration is asymmetrical, and the scoreboard is off-center. The irregular seating configuration forced KHL teams Dynamo Moscow and SKA St. Petersburg to cancel their September 2013 exhibition series at Barclays.
The hockey configuration can only seat 15,795, whereas the capacity at Nets games is 17,732. The good news is that the Islanders still plan on moving to Barclays at the beginning of next season. The bad news is that they’ll have to pull off quite the shuffle to satisfy all of their season ticket holders. Barclays Center seating configuration: great for NBA All-Star Weekend, bad for the New York Islanders.
Grade: C
Audio/Visual:
The exterior of the building contains an open-air oculus that holds an oblong LED screen. Built by Daktronics, the 3,000 square foot, 1.5 centimeter-thick oculus LED marquee displays ads, various animations, and different video angles of the game, while it’s taking place.
Daktronics also built the 70,000-pound, three-story-tall scoreboard, a 190-foot ribbon display in the bowl, and a 73-foot long LED wayfinding display in the lobby of the building. Altogether, the arena has nearly 8,000 square feet of LED screens. Parsons Technologies provided the Broadcast, Sound Reinforcement/Audio, and Voice and Data capabilities for the stadium.
Grade: A
Sustainability:
Let’s start off by acknowledging that Barclays Center is the first LEED Silver certified sports stadium in the New York City metropolitan area. The arena includes a storm water retention system, energy efficient LED lighting, and a mixed recycling stream. The four months of wet-and-dry cycles that the weathering steel panels went through to gain its current hue probably wasn’t the most efficient use of water or energy, but the building’s LEED status more than compensates for that.
Forest City Ratner, the site developer, planned a beautiful new transit facility to directly connect Barclays with the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center subway stop. The arena is also adjacent to Atlantic Terminal, which provides access to the Long Island Rail Road. Keep your heads up Islanders fans! Over three quarters of Barclays’ guests use public transportation. Part of that is due to its lack of any official parking structure–which is fantastic for reducing congestion and pollution–and part of that is due to its location in the densest city within the western hemisphere. The below ground configuration of the arena’s first level also helps reduce congestion.
Barclays is a huge improvement from the Nets’ old home at the Izod Center in East Rutherford and the Islanders’ soon-to-be defunct Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale. Building a new stadium from scratch is usually more energy intensive and emits more pollution than renovating an old stadium, yet both of the previous stadiums relied heavily on autos and had many square miles of surface parking lots. It’s great to have both teams under one roof in a transit-heavy area.
Grade: B
Fan Experience:
Barclays offers plenty of entertainment for fans. There are four lounges and three club-seating options, in addition to Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club. However, fans need tickets to experience these venues. Only the Starbucks and Metro PCS are open for non-ticketed fans and on non-gamedays. The arena does get points, however, for having some original Brooklyn and NYC vendor options. Levy Restaurants has worked with 55 local vendors to ensure that there are plenty of great Brooklyn food options.
The arena also offers fans a Barclays Center app, which displays event discounts and vendor options by concourse, as well as different views of game action from around the stadium. The app’s eWallet feature also allows you to pay for your concessions with your smartphone without having to grab your wallet. The app certainly improves the fan amenities, including the food and beverage options. Yet, if Barclays really wants to cut down on concessions lines and increase the amount of time fans get to actually watch the game, they should consider implementing an app feature, where fans can order concessions directly to their seats.
Grade: B+
Overall Stadium Grade: B
Not bad, Barclays Center, not bad. I’m a pretty tough grader, and you passed with flying colors. Too bad the hockey layout dragged your score down–without it, you could have gotten an A. While Madison Square Garden certainly has its issues, it is still the “mecca of basketball.” Barclays Center has a long way to go until it can claim, itself, as the most famous arena in New York, but it’s doing well for itself to start.
In all seriousness, this venue is a marvel of technology and design. Unfortunately, the Pacific Park development, where it is located, is mired by the New York state government’s usage of eminent domain over businesses and residents in the Brooklyn community. Hopefully, in time, Barclays Center becomes a positive, unifying force in the community. The NBA All-Star Weekend has arrived to Barclays Center; and this weekend, basketball fans everywhere will say “Hello Brooklyn”.
Jeff Horwitz will graduate this spring from the Masters of Urban Planning and Policy program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His concentration is Transportation, and he currently interns at an affordable housing consulting company. Feel free to email him or chat with him on Twitter about Stadium innovations and advancements in sports.