Frenemies on and off the court, the Clippers and Lakers have shared an arena like battling brothers for 25 years through good times and bad.getty images
Vanessa Bryant had one building in mind for her late husband and daughter’s memorial service in 2020: The House That Kobe Built. That cavernous arena on the downtown corner of Figueroa and Chick Hearn Court — known then as Staples Center — was near and dear to her family, was where Kobe helped raise five championship banners, was where his No. 8 and No. 24 hung from the rafters. The service would be there or nowhere, and she asked Kobe’s team, the Lakers, if they could stage it on Valentine’s Day, for the sole purpose of love.
The Lakers ran it up the Staples Center flagpole to arena President Lee Zeidman, who had problematic news: A Banda MS concert was already scheduled for that day. Vanessa then asked poignantly for Feb. 24, because 24 had been Kobe’s jersey number at the end. Zeidman perused the arena’s overloaded calendar and found another glitch: The Los Angeles Clippers were playing there that night against Memphis.
Them again. The Clippers. In other words, it would all be up to that team down the hall, the team that 41 times a year covered up Kobe’s banners and numbers, the team that over two decades had been ridiculed as the Lakers’ “little brother” or “redheaded stepchild,” or, as J.J. Redick said recently on national TV, “distant cousin.” Awkward.
But Zeidman knew the protocol. To hold the ceremony on the day of a game, which meant canceling morning shootarounds, they needed league and Clippers approval. The Lakers called the NBA, which promptly granted permission. So it was up to the Clippers, who could take the high road and say yes or the low road and say no …
Clippers owner Steve Ballmer likes to get involved in the action shooting T-shirts to fans.getty images
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Connected at the hip, but not by championships, the Lakers and Clippers are about to end the oddest living arrangement in NBA history. To say they shared Staples Center, now Crypto.com Arena, for a quarter-century is an absurd simplification, because from the day both teams arrived in October 1999, the Lakers have dwarfed the Clippers, straight down to late Lakers owner Jerry Buss’ visionary lease.
The backstory is about pulleys and secret walkways and doubleheaders and day games and Grammys and Doc Rivers. Few realize the Lakers actually had a reason to root for Clippers sellouts, or that the Clippers have actually won 37 of the past 47 head-to-head matchups. This had never been done in NBA history — two teams making one arena their permanent home — and now that it’s over in a matter of days or weeks, the truth can be told: The Clippers feel like they’ve been on a 25-year road trip.
But all’s well that ends well, especially as far as Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is concerned, because the Clippers move into the $2 billion Intuit Dome in four months just as Crypto.com Arena gets ready to gut the Clippers’ locker room and remodel the Lakers’. It’s win-win or a sad day, depending how nostalgic you are, but there’s still hope for a first Hallway Series this spring if the NBA playoffs fall a certain way — meaning they can order the T-shirts again. It’s a long, winding story.
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The laughable part is the place was built for hockey. At its infancy, the L.A. Arena Company, which later became a subsidiary of AEG, was somewhat of a Phil Anschutz-Ed Roski Jr. gamble. The Los Angeles Kings co-owners, who also held about a 30% stake in the Lakers, assumed if they brought both teams downtown from the Forum in Inglewood, the fan bases would follow, rejuvenating the city’s business district. Although he passed on taking equity in the building, Buss was a willing partner, relieved he could finally stop peddling concert dates at the Forum and just be a tenant.
It was freeing for the entire Buss family, and the arena’s first president, Tim Leiweke, said that Buss’ daughter Jeanie even helped design the building. Shaquille O’Neal showed up with a shovel for the groundbreaking, and during an early construction tour, GM Jerry West reminded Leiweke, “I want the Lakers’ locker room to be an office, not a spa.” West actually kept arena blueprints in his office and even told a young Bryant not to worry; he’d be allowed to shoot there all hours of the night. “The Lakers were as close to equity partners as you could get without being an equity partner,” Leiweke said.
For Jerry Buss, the timing was prescient. The Lakers were ascending, with an in-his-prime Shaq to go with the mercurial Bryant, and Buss just needed to reel in Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson. West again used Staples Center as a recruiting tool, and, along with Zeidman, led Jackson on a hard hat tour where the free agent coach made his own locker room suggestions. The Lakers got their man.
Buss was so certain of the building’s upside that he had it written into his lease that, should a second NBA team move in, the Lakers would receive a percentage of AEG’s game-to-game profits from that other NBA team, an “economic formula” that included revenue from food and beverage, parking, premium seating and suites. “It wasn’t based on ticket sales, it was based simply on whatever revenue the arena was making,” said a person familiar with the lease. One source said the Lakers would receive 25% of the arena’s cut every time that second NBA team played a game. Another source said 10%; another said somewhere in between.
Either way, if someone — let’s say then-Clippers owner Donald Sterling — wanted to piggyback into the Staples Center, Buss stood to earn extra cash. “The genius of Dr. Buss,” said a Lakers official. “He’s one of a kind.”
Staples Center was a boon to Lakers owner Jerry Buss, who passed away in 2013, as he earned a percentage of the arena’s cut every time the rival Clippers played a home game. getty images
Meanwhile, about 2.3 miles down Figueroa Street, Sterling’s woebegone Clippers were still toiling in the league’s oldest, most shameful building: the L.A. Sports Arena. Built in 1959, rats would coast through the locker room (“Saw players jump on chairs,” former Clippers coach Alvin Gentry said) and twice there were rain delays due to ceiling leaks. “They couldn’t play until the rain stopped,” longtime Clippers broadcaster Ralph Lawler said, slightly embarrassed.
If game ops people wanted to go lights-out during player intros, they’d flip the switch off and immediately back on — because the arena’s archaic bulbs took roughly 10 minutes to brighten. Or to ensure players could take a hot shower after games, an equipment manager needed to turn the faucets on at halftime because the water took 45 minutes to heat up.
Back in New York, NBA Commissioner David Stern was tempted to evict Sterling from the Sports Arena, though he was encouraged when Sterling scheduled a string of games at The Pond in Anaheim. The crowds were hearty, and the sense was it could be a boon to move full time to Orange County. But Sterling was Beverly Hills through and through, and the team’s executive vice president at the time, Andy Roeser, said, “He was just never going to give up the Los Angeles market.”
Sterling might have stayed in a half-full Sports Arena forever — “He’d never get embarrassed by the fact that there were only 3,000 people in the building, as long as one of them was Billy Crystal,” a league observer said — but Stern wasn’t having it. The commissioner had an ally in Leiweke, who had opened Minneapolis’ Target Center and rued the day the Minnesota Wild spurned the Timberwolves to build their own venue. Rather than let it happen again in L.A. (not that Sterling had the wherewithal or ambition to build his own arena), he and Anschutz decided to woo the Clippers to Staples Center. With Stern’s blessing.
“Your immediate reaction — because it’s never been done before — is: That can’t happen,” Roeser said. “Because the other NBA team’s never going to let you in, right? But when you break it apart: Why can’t it happen? The [Lakers] don’t own the building. It’s not their decision to make, right?”
The negotiations in 1998 were legendary. After months of Sterling indecision, Leiweke said he told Roeser, “Andy, you’re either in or out. Because we’ve got to start submitting dates to the NBA.”
Roeser told Leiweke they would iron it out over dinner at the Peninsula Hotel, the three of them. That night, Leiweke and Roeser were on time, while Sterling arrived casually late with an entourage. Leiweke told Roeser, “You guys aren’t serious, I’m gone.”
The arena was roughly six months from completion now, and Roeser called to ask Leiweke if Sterling could tour the facility. Sterling asked to see the would-be Clippers’ locker room, which was a standard performing artist’s dressing area. He then viewed the Lakers’ locker room, which was 1,500 square feet larger, had been vetted by West and Jackson, and had a grand, steel-plated door. Sterling’s comment was, “Their door is bigger than my door,” before whining: “When my players walk in, I want them to feel special.”
An exasperated Leiweke told Sterling, “The Lakers committed to me five years ago, and you haven’t yet. I’ll do everything I can to fix it and treat you as much as I can as an equal. But you can’t make a decision.” Leiweke assumed it was over.
Out of nowhere, though, Sterling called Leiweke to say, “Timmy, I want to make you happy,” and pronounced he’d sign the Staples Center contract. Except when the package arrived, he’d only signed the first page. “You have germaphobics; he was a contract-a-phobic,” Leiweke said.
It’s Leiweke’s understanding that Stern chewed Sterling out, regaling the mogul with a terse, “You’re doing the deal, sign the the damn deal. I’m not going to let you play at the Sports Arena anymore.”
It was April 1999, and the Lakers, Clippers and AEG were finally in bed together. For better or worse.
The arena hosted the Kobe Bryant celebration.getty images
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It was up to NBA schedule maker Matt Winick to make it “for better,” because there weren’t enough days in the week. The Kings, who owned the building, got priority on Thursday and Saturday nights. The Lakers’ lease gave them priority on Friday and Sunday nights. The Clippers’ pitiable lease left them with crumbs.
Armed with a late ’90s computer program and a No. 2 pencil, Winick did all he could for the Clippers. “But if the building’s not available, there is no computer program that’s going to solve the issue,” Winick said. So the team ended up with a spate of Saturday matinees.
That was further exacerbated by the Grammys, which also had committed to the building. It meant all three teams had to take 10- to 12-day excursions in February, lopping off more available dates. The dreaded “Grammy trip” sealed the deal for the Clippers: They’d gone from rainy days (at the Sports Arena) to Mondays.
The saving grace was Zeidman, who quickly mastered the art of day-night weekend doubleheaders. His early M.O. was “to throw as many people out there as you need” to turn a hockey rink into a basketball court, or a Clippers game into a Lakers game. It wasn’t as simple as it sounded. The Lakers imported their bright theatrical lights from the Forum and wouldn’t let the Clippers borrow them. The Lakers scorer’s table was smaller to increase courtside celebrity seating. VIP clubs and team merchandise had to be swapped out and, of course, separate basketball floors had to be pieced together.
In an early brainstorm session, arena executive Bobby Goldwater suggested the teams play on one “Staples Center’” court to save time and storage. That got shouted down in a nanosecond. Zeidman promised his crew could do emergency switchovers in two hours, though he preferred 6½. Before long, his changeovers became what Gene Li, the NBA’s current associate vice president of broadcast scheduling, called the “gold standard.” Other arena execs would fly in to observe.
Still, that debut season had its nuances, particularly the four times the rivals played at Staples. For Lakers “home games” against the Clippers, it was simple: Lakers players would turn right out of their locker room toward the nearby north home team tunnel and the home team bench. The Clippers, whose locker room was 100 feet to the south, would turn left for the south tunnel and visiting bench. Easy.
But for Clippers “home games,” protocol had Lakers players turning left toward the south tunnel and Clippers turning right to the north, meaning they’d crisscross each other. So, for those games, the Lakers were pointed toward a side door by the laundry room to a back parallel walkway that took them south without encountering a Clipper. The last thing the arena wanted was an incident.
Right away, the Lakers balked. “We were supposed to walk the back hallway,” said former Lakers coach Brian Shaw. “But we’d go, ‘The Clippers — who are they?’” One night, Bryant was famously heard snarling, “I’m not going out the visitors tunnel. F*** that. This is my house.”
They were all Lakers “home games,” anyway, based on the number of fans in purple and gold. On the Clippers’ home court, Kobe would hear “MVP” chants. Hung in the rafters, at the time, were 11 Lakers banners and nine retired Lakers jerseys. The Clippers might as well have been the Washington Generals.
The cherry on top was the Lakers winning their 12th championship that first year at Staples. “They had a parade right outside our office,” Roeser said. “That sucked. That’s rubbing it in.” Before long, it was a three-peat. Laker envy permeated the Clippers organization, not to mention Buss was profiting off every Clippers home game, per his dreamy lease.
Switching the arena floor from the Clippers to the Lakers is a huge part of the Crypto.com Arena routine. And don’t forget the Kings on ice.ap images
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“He foresaw us coming and got a boost,” Roeser said. “Buss is the smartest one of everybody.”
It was a lonely time to be a Clipper. They had a sales wiz named Carl Lahr, who was wise enough to market Clippers games as a cheaper alternative to see NBA basketball. “I had great respect for Carl because he was swimming upstream every day,” Leiweke said. “But they actually drew pretty well.”
Truth was, Sterling was fairly content. Buss was his longtime friend, whom he’d loaned money to in 1979 when Buss was closing on the Lakers, and AEG let Sterling’s entourage have their run of the place on game nights. He didn’t have to pony up $400 million for his own arena, could charge more for tickets than the old building and saw his attendance figures rise from 28th in the NBA in 2000 to 13th by 2006. His secret: Ignore the Lakers, accept his lot in life.
“The Staples Center represented a turnkey opportunity to play in the best venue in the country,” Roeser said. “If we play a couple of Monday games and matinee games and our locker room isn’t as big as the Lakers, you make it work. It bothered us. But it’s not going to ruin your life.”
The Lakers ignored them back. Buss had once said, “L.A. is not a basketball town, it’s a Laker town,” and the only way the Clippers could begin to reverse that was to beat them in a playoff “Hallway Series.” By 2005-06, it seemed feasible. Behind Elton Brand, the Clippers defeated the Nuggets in the first round, and if the Lakers could close out a 3-1 series lead against Phoenix, it would be Clippers-Lakers for the L.A. city championship.
AEG employees printed up colorful Hallway Series T-shirts, certain it was a fait accompli. But even though Kobe put up 50 points in a potential close-out Game 6, the Lakers collapsed and fell in seven games. “We threw everything out,” said an AEG employee. “Somewhere in a Third World country, someone is wearing a ‘Hallway Series’ shirt.”
The Clippers lost to Phoenix that following round, another wasted chance to bogart the Lakers. A fed-up Lawler went to see Roeser, circa 2009, asking him to cover up the then-15 Laker banners that mocked every Clippers “home” game. Lawler said Roeser’s response was, “Ah, we can’t do that,” a story Roeser confirmed.
“We never really bothered with that,” Roeser said. “They earned them, and if we want to change it, we should earn our own.”
A title was their sincere goal, and after Stern vetoed a 2011 trade that would’ve sent Chris Paul to the Lakers, the Clippers acquired him instead, ticking off their rivals. It led to the arena’s high-water mark of May 2012, when Staples hosted six Kings, Lakers and Clippers playoff games in four days, including two weekend doubleheaders. The Clippers, with a swaggy roster known as “Lob City,” were now seventh in the league in attendance.
By 2013, they’d hired the Celtics’ championship coach Doc Rivers, who didn’t mince words in an early marketing meeting, saying, “Well, the first thing I want to do is cover up those damn banners.” That was met with “Oh boy, you sure you want to do this?” and “Bad idea, the Lakers are going to be mad at us.” Rivers nearly blew a gasket.
“That took me over the top,” Rivers said. “I was, ‘Are you kidding me? We’re worried about how the Lakers feel? This is about the Clippers. We’re GOING to cover up the banners.’”
After mild pushback from Roeser, Rivers told him, “If you need someone to blame, blame me. Tell them Doc Rivers wanted to do this.” Roeser ran it by AEG, who greenlit a pulley system that, before Clippers home games, would unfurl Clippers player images over Lakers banners and jerseys — so long as Sterling paid for it.
“Jeanie Buss wasn’t mad at all,” Rivers said. “She said something like: ‘It took someone like you to have the balls to do that.’ She actually thought it was the right thing. She was laughing like, ‘Why’d it take so long?’”
The Clippers had finally made up some ground, and on March 6, 2014, Sterling witnessed the Clippers annihilate the Lakers, 142-94. It was a full-circle moment, validating the move 15 years prior. Sterling’s contract-a-phobia was over; he signed a new 10-year lease through 2024.
“Here’s my view,” Roeser said. “The Lakers never thought about the Clippers more than three times: the day we moved to L.A., the day we signed our Staples Center lease and the day we got Chris Paul. Meanwhile, the whole time we’re looking at them going, ‘Can’t we have some of their success?’”
Then, six weeks after his proud Lakers blowout, Sterling was gone, banned from the NBA for racist remarks. A mega-billionaire named Steve Ballmer attended a Kings playoff game a month later with AEG President and CEO Dan Beckerman and marveled at the rambunctious Staples Center crowd. Rumors flew. By August, Ballmer bought the Clippers for $2 billion, a team Sterling purchased in 1981 for all of $13.5 million.
Ballmer must have seen something nobody else saw.
The $2 billion Intuit Dome in Inglewood will become the Clippers’ new palatial home next season, finally giving L.A.’s younger NBA franchise a home of its own.getty images
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No telling if the Intuit Dome was a gleam yet in Ballmer’s eye. Based on his initial moves, maybe it wasn’t. Because he, Gillian Zucker, president of business operations, and his marketing team were on fire. Literally.
Ballmer and crew wanted a pyro show during player intros and asked Zeidman and Co. to put flame dispensers on the baskets. Zeidman was half-afraid the stanchions might fry, but agreed anyway. The Clippers also purchased more T-shirt cannons, dropped more parachutes from the catwalks loaded with merch. They dressed the arena up red, brought in a DJ, asked for theatrical lighting and unveiled … hot dog cannons?
“They said, ‘Steve wants to introduce a cannon that shoots hot dogs into the stands,’” Zeidman said. “I went, ‘Really?’ Because, first, I need approval from Levy Restaurants, our food and beverage provider. Second, I need to make sure the health department is OK with this. And third, we’ve got to be certain that, while hot dogs are in midair, the wrapper’s not going to come off and the hot dog goes one way and the bun goes another.”
Soon, flying hot dogs became reality, something the Lakers would never dream of. But that was the charm and dichotomy of it all. The Lakers were somewhat stuck in their glory ’80s. They still had Laker Girls and P.A. announcer Lawrence Tanter, and still played Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A” after wins. But the motivated Clippers had the hardest working marketing crew on earth, with no idea off limits. They asked graffiti/tattoo artist Mr. Cartoon to design a street-style font for their uniforms. They blared Tupac’s “California Love” when they won. They marketed to the inner-city, working-class, anti-Laker fan, which … maybe didn’t exist.
For all their efforts, a Clippers “home game” against their rival was still practically a Laker fan fest, even though the Clippers at one point won 18 of 20 against them. By 2018, the Clippers were back to 22nd in league attendance. Ballmer steamed over it, ruminated over it. He kept thinking about that rowdy Kings game he attended with Beckerman and wondered why the ambience at Clippers games remained so flat.
Ballmer asked Kings President Luc Robitaille why their games were louder, if they were doctoring the sound system. He was on a mission for noise and concluded Staples Center acoustics, because the arena was sloped higher at the south end, were subpar. Zeidman said, “We didn’t want him to leave,” and claims AEG offered to hear his and Zucker’s proposals for arena renovations. Ballmer wanted to drop the south ceiling or add acoustical clouds or move seats closer to the floor, and Zeidman said AEG hired architects to vet the possibilities.
Overall, AEG felt it bent over backwards for the Clippers, even increasing the money the team would earn from the arena’s 150 suites and 250 club seats — from next to nothing in the fledgling Sterling years to millions now. Leiweke, at one point, made sure the Kings gifted them some Saturday night time slots, as well (though only twice this season). At the Clippers’ expense, they twice remodeled the Clippers locker room, added a courtside club and additional baseline seats. The arena believed it was all a good-faith attempt to pacify them, but current Clippers executives, who would not comment publicly, saw it differently.
Whereas Sterling was content as third wheel, Ballmer was summarily annoyed. Clippers sources said his proposed renovations were ridiculed and nixed by someone in upper AEG management. He, Rivers and other Clippers officials felt having to play day games cost them as many as five wins a year. Newly signed star Kawhi Leonard complained day games usurped his pregame routine, and he’d often sit them out. Players claimed arena security guards openly rooted for the Lakers. The front office tried so hard to be elite, even hiring a renowned chef to cook players pregame meals, but felt “disrespected,” convinced the odds against seeing a true home court advantage were “insurmountable.”
Rivers had warned Ballmer about the inequities from the beginning, telling the former CEO of Microsoft: “Either move this team to Seattle and make it the Sonics or build a new arena and make it our own.” Rivers said Ballmer jovially answered, “Well, the one place we’re not going is Seattle, because I just paid $2 billion for this team.”
So a new arena it would be. Leiweke remembered giving Ballmer a tour of remodeled Climate Pledge Arena, with the billionaire saying: “Look, I’ve been blessed with the wherewithal to go make this right. Some people have yachts, some have lots of homes everywhere. I own a basketball team. And what I want to do is build the greatest arena ever for our basketball team, and our current situation is not that.”
Leiweke, the man who personally brought the Clippers to Staples two decades before, calmly answered: “More power to you, Steve. I get it now.”
The arena provides a great backdrop for massive fan celebrations after both NBA and NHL titles.getty images
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By 2019, it was the height of the Clippers-Lakers cold war, or so it seemed. The Clippers unveiled billboards from Century City to Culver City that read, “Street Lights Over Spotlights” and “Driven Over Given” — passive aggressive jabs at the Lakers. “Like, why do an advertising campaign that’s got an audience of one?” said a Lakers official. “Instead, why don’t you just call us up, insult us and save yourself some money?” Former Laker James Worthy went so far as to say on live TV: “Move back to San Diego.” Instead, they were moving to Inglewood’s Intuit Dome.
Lakers officials, who also would not comment publicly, were “agnostic” about the relocation, amused that Clippers execs “spent so much time thinking about us.” AEG and Zeidman, caught in the middle, admitted it was the “end of an era,” of a Lakers-Clippers timeshare that turned Staples/Crypto into the most iconic arena outside of MSG. If only the Lakers and Clippers could see the forest through the trees and realize it.
Then, in January 2020, Kobe and Gigi Bryant were killed in a helicopter crash that shook the globe, but mostly SoCal. When Kobe’s widow, Vanessa, requested the Feb. 24 memorial at Staples, a day the Clippers had the arena, the Lakers specifically asked Zeidman to call Ballmer’s people for them. Who knew what they’d say?
What happened next sums up the intended spirit of Staples/Crypto. The Clippers, in tears themselves over a lost icon from down the hall, said: Of course. In a heartbeat.
They took the highest road. Some things are bigger than an infuriating lease. Because, even when Intuit Dome opens next season and both teams actually get to play regularly on Friday nights, the Lakers and Clippers still will have the same first name: Los Angeles.
