Staples Center faces long Sunday
By Ramona Shelburne
ESPNLosAngeles.com
LOS ANGELES -- The folks who run Staples Center and the L.A. Live complex in downtown Los Angeles like to call it the sports and entertainment capital of the world. But even this is a bit much.
With the Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Clippers and Los Angeles Kings all hosting two home playoff games between Thursday and Sunday, and the final stage of the Amgen Tour of California cycling race set to finish in front of the building Sunday morning, Staples Center is preparing for a dizzying weekend.
"It's going to be unprecedented for any arena anywhere," Staples Center senior vice president and general manager Lee Zeidman said. "No one will ever duplicate it except for us because we're the only arena with an NHL team and two NBA teams."
Some are deeming it the sports version of "Carmageddon," the widely publicized weekend-long shutdown last summer of a 10-mile stretch of the busy 405 Freeway (Interstate 405).
If the weekend goes off like "Carmageddon" did -- with little more than a mild inconvenience for most Angelenos -- Zeidman and his staff will be ecstatic.
Still, there's a reason he hasn't slept much this week.
"The doubleheader with the Lakers and Clippers on Saturday won't be a problem. We've done about 127 doubleheader conversions since this building opened in 1998," he said. "The thing that concerns me is probably Sunday."
Ah, Sunday. That's when the final stage of the country's largest stage cycling race is set to finish in front of Staples Center -- approximately 30 minutes before the Kings and Phoenix Coyotes drop the puck at noon PT for Game 4 of the Western Conference finals.
What would complicate matters for Zeidman is if the hockey game goes to sudden-death overtime and pushes back the 7:30 p.m. PT start of the Clippers-Spurs game -- the fourth game in their best-of-seven Western Conference semifinal series.
There's only so much Zeidman and his staff can do to mitigate the situation. They've encouraged Kings fans to arrive at Staples Center very early Sunday to help avoid any overlap with the end of the Tour of California.
They're opening the arena doors at 9 a.m. local time and will provide free coffee and doughnuts. They've also constructed pedestrian bridges over nearby Figueroa Avenue and set up a free shuttle from the nearby L.A. Coliseum on the USC campus, where cycling fans are being asked to park.
"While it's not my decision about what happens to that 7:30 Clipper game if the hockey game goes into overtime, I'm concerned about it," Zeidman said. "There's going to be a drop-dead time somewhere along the way, because what we can't have is the hockey game ending around 5 or 5:30.
"It takes 2 hours and 15 minutes (to change the floor from hockey to basketball), so now that's 7:15, and the teams need 90 minutes to warm up, so that puts you back to a 9 o'clock tipoff," he said.
"So you're looking at potentially 20,000 Kings fans emptying the building at the same time 20,000 Clippers fans are waiting outside and we're not ready yet. That's my biggest fear."
If you're curious: The NHL record for the longest Stanley Cup playoff game belongs to the Detroit Red Wings and Montreal Maroons, who went into six overtimes (116 minutes, 30 seconds) in 1936 in a 1-0 Wings victory.
In the modern era, the Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins went five overtimes (92:01) in 2000 before the Flyers' Keith Primeau scored and settled things.
Zeidman says he's working with officials from both leagues and their television partners to develop contingency plans for all of these scenarios. But he acknowledges that there may not be a perfect solution.
"If I could talk to you about it in weather terms, this is the perfect storm. But if that happened, it'd be a tsunami," he said.
"I'm sure we'll get to a certain point where they'll say, 'Either we're going to play by this time, or maybe we'll move it to Monday.' I have no idea."
Tired yet? Try being Zeidman or any of the other upper management at Staples Center.
"I just lay there and think about everything," he said, when asked how much he'd slept lately. "It's going to be interesting to see how much more I sleep as it gets to Sunday."
The good news is that the staff at Staples Center, which is owned and operated by the Anschutz Entertainment Group, is probably the most experienced in the business at dealing with these sorts of challenges.
In March alone, the arena hosted 33 events in 31 days. Doubleheaders, particularly on Sundays, are common here.
The ice hockey surface is always in place, while the two basketball courts can be switched in and out in about 75 minutes. It gets more challenging when the 35-man crew is asked to change from hockey to basketball in a short amount of time.
"My guys tell me it's easier to go from basketball to hockey because you're just picking everything up, versus laying everything down," Zeidman said.
Zeidman said he insisted to both leagues early in the planning stages that if there was going to be a hockey-basketball doubleheader, it would be better for basketball to go first. It didn't work out that way, as the start time of the Kings-Coyotes game couldn't be altered because of network time-slotting.
So Zeidman and his staff have no choice but to roll with the punches, plan, prepare and spread the word as much as possible.
"We're trying to educate everybody," he said. "The streets in and around downtown will close from about 7:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. The bike race will be done about 11:50 a.m., so we're encouraging Kings fans who are coming to the game to get here early."
Kings fans are encouraged to park north of Staples Center, cycling fans are encouraged to park south of the building and everyone is encouraged to take the Metro.
If avoiding all of that hassle isn't enough reason to get there early, there's always the lure of free food.
"We've got Krispy Kreme coming," Zeidman joked. "We'll have thousands of doughnuts."
