With late capitalism trudging along and NBA owners looking for any excuse to make a few extra bucks, arena naming rights have become the norm, but sometimes when businesses fail, those names can go horribly wrong
1) ARCO Arena, Sacramento, 1985-2011
2) Power Balance Pavilion, Sacramento, 2011-2012
3) Sleep Train Arena, Sacramento, 2012-2016
As the three major U.S. sports all perpetually grew into big businesses in the years immediately following World War II, capitalism rendered it inevitable that owners would look for new and creative sources of revenue. The first sports stadium to bear the name of a corporation was in St. Louis, when the Cardinals’ Sportsman's Park was re-branded as Busch Stadium in 1954. The NBA was still a burgeoning league at the time, and in addition to the then iconic Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden, teams played in arenas with archaic names like Fort Wayne War Memorial Stadium and the Philadelphia Civic Center (in... you guessed it... Philadelphia). It took about 30 years for basketball arenas to start adopting naming rights, and it's generally believed to have started when the Kings moved to Sacramento in 1985 and took up residence in ARCO Arena. When the NBA initially approved the Kings relocating to the California capital from Kansas City, they failed to ensure that the new city housed an arena large enough to host professional basketball games. While waiting for a legitimate arena to be built and opened, Kings ownership settled on a large office building and warehouse as an interim solution. Needing a quick infusion of money to convert it into a basketball stadium, the owners inked a naming rights deal with ARCO, an oil company based in Southern California. Thus a former office building became the Sacramento Sports Arena and then, quickly, the ARCO Arena. The makeshift arena had no modern amenities and seated just barely north of 10,000, but sold out every game it hosted over the course of three seasons. In 1988, the new ARCO Arena opened on schedule and the original went back to its intended use as an office building (it's now the headquarters of the California Department of Consumer Affairs). The naming rights with ARCO were signed through 2007, but in 2000 the company was bought out by BP. Though the ARCO name and logo disappeared quickly for consumers, the arena not only continued to bear its name through 2007, it actually extended the deal under financial straits through 2011. When the second ARCO deal expired, the arena was christened Power Balance Pavilion, sponsored by the company that made those bracelets that claimed to use "holographic technology" to improve balance and focus, which briefly snookered a lot of pro athletes (mainly baseball players). The corporation had already found itself in legal trouble by the time it lent its name to Sacramento's arena, and in November of 2011 filed for bankruptcy. The naming rights were then sold for the '12-'13 season to Sleep Train, a California-only mattress retailer, who retained the rights until the Kings moved into the new Golden 1 Center in 2016, even though the company itself was sold to Mattress Firm in 2014.
4) Wachovia Center, Philadelphia, 2003-2010
The epitome of naming rights lament will remain the Houston Astros and Enron for the foreseeable future, but the NBA had its own awkward bank naming rights issue in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. While Lehman Brothers grabbed the biggest overall headlines and Citigroup the biggest notoriety in sports for their continued sponsorship of the New York Mets' stadium, the biggest bank to fail in the wake of the crisis was an NBA sponsor, Wachovia. Founded as First Union Bank in North Carolina in 1908, it purchased Philadelphia-based CoreStates Bank in 1998, and with it their pending naming rights to the city's new arena. The Sixers had been playing in the legendary Spectrum since 1967, but by the mid '90s the arena had become a relic, lacking proper sight lines and luxury boxes. The newly minted First Union Center opened its doors in 1998, and three years later the corporation acquired Wachovia, and the Wachovia Center was in operation by the start of the ’03-’04 season. Though it was the nation’s fourth-largest bank in 2008, Wachovia needed to be bailed out by the U.S. government after the stock market crash, and when the ’08-’09 NBA season opened, the Wachovia branding on Philadelphia's arena must have seemed like a sick joke to residents, who had approved public money to partially fund its construction a decade prior. Wells Fargo eventually swooped in and bought out Wachovia in December of that year, but the previous signage remained intact, a standing testament to Wachovia's avarice and downfall, until Wells Fargo Center was officially ordained in July of 2010. Though Wells Fargo has had its own share of recent controversy and legal trouble, the name still stands as of the ’18-’19 season.
5) MCI Center, Washington, 1997-2006
6) SBC Center, San Antonio, 2002-2006
Headquartered originally in New York but eventually moved to Washington, D.C., MCI was a landmark corporation in the dismantling of the AT&T telecommunications monopoly, but eventually got swallowed up by the newly competitive industry it fostered. It actually moved to Washington in the late '70s to better fight AT&T in the Justice Department, and in 1997 purchased the naming rights to the new basketball and hockey arena built in the city's Chinatown district. Washington re-branded itself as the Wizards in their first season in the MCI Center, a moniker that has failed to bring much luck, as the team has made just four second round playoff appearances in the 21 years since. MCI was similarly ill-fated, staking a large claim in shaky innovations, some of which were just ahead of their time (e-commerce music stores, "friends and family" plans) and some of which were just out of step with the times (1-800-COLLECT). Just one year after the MCI Center opened, the company was purchased by WorldCom and the MCI logo slowly started to disappear. By 2005, the only place it could really be found was in and around the D.C. arena, and after the bankrupt WorldCom was bought out by Verizon, the Verizon Center opened its doors for the ’06-’07 season (it eventually became the Capital One Arena in 2017). Another longtime competitor of AT&T was Southwestern Bell Corporation (SBC), which moved its headquarters to San Antonio in 1993 just as the Spurs were moving into the Alamodome. Though it was brand new and state-of-the-art at the time, the Alamodome was also intended mainly for football, and Spurs games featured poor sight lines and the quirk of a large portion of seats getting cordoned off. The new SBC Center was built and opened for the ’02-’03 season, but just two years later the company purchased AT&T and adopted its name, effectively ending the SBC brand. The arena was quickly renamed the AT&T Center in 2006.
7) Compaq Center, Houston, 1998-2003
It took four years to build, which forced the Rockets to play in the Astrodome in the meantime, but when the Summit Arena debuted in Houston in 1975 it was considered a state-of-the-art masterpiece. Twenty years later the Summit was the site of back-to-back Rockets championships, but would soon be awash in the naming rights monsoon that overtook the league in the late '90s, including a re-branding as the Compaq Center during the '98-'99 lock-out shortened season. Meanwhile, owner Leslie Alexander was simultaneously trying to secure public funds for a replacement, and finally got his wish after threatening to relocate to Louisville. While this was going on, Compaq, a Houston-based computer company that was founded in 1982 and peaked around 1996, was swiftly losing market share to rising competitors HP, Dell, and Apple. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the company essentially became insoluble and was bought out by HP in 2002. As the Compaq Center remained active as home of the Rockets for the '02-'03 season while the company logo slowly started to disappear from the market place, Alexander negotiated a deal to brand the new arena the Toyota Center (the Compaq Center in San Jose that hosts the San Jose Sharks simply transitioned its name into the HP Pavilion). The building formerly known as the Summit Arena and Compaq Center is now the home base of Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, and was briefly in the news in 2017 when the mega-pastor was slow to open his doors to local residents displaced by Hurricane Harvey.
8) EnergySolutions Arena, Salt Lake City, 2006-2016
Unlike other examples on this list where the insolvency or disintegration of a company rendered its naming rights as confusing, this is a case where the locals were embarrassed by the moniker even as the company was thriving. Opened in 1991 as the Delta Center, named after the airline that has a major hub in Salt Lake City, the arena was a replacement for the Salt Palace, where the Jazz had played for 12 years, as well as the ABA’s Utah Stars before them. When Delta declined to renew its naming rights in 2006, they were sold to EnergySolutions, a company that specializes in disposing nuclear waste. It was the first major U.S. stadium to be named after an energy company, and it drew immediate derision from fans and the media, who took to giving the arena sarcastic nicknames like “The Dump” (a reference to a radioactive waste disposal zone that EnergySolutions owns), “Glow Dome,” “Chernobowl,” and “Energy Pollutions Arena.” The naming rights changed hands again in 2015, this time getting sold to Vivint, a Provo-based home security service provider. Though the building is officially titled the Vivint Smart Home Arena, the court itself is actually called the Larry H. Miller Court, named after the longtime Jazz owner who passed away in 2010.
9) America West Arena, Phoenix, 1992-2006
10) US Airways Center, Phoenix, 2006-2014
Few industries have been as capricious in the 21st century as airlines, and Phoenix's arena musical chairs is indicative of it. The Suns played at Veterans Memorial Coliseum (which is still standing and retains its name, and now mostly functions as partial site of the Arizona State Fair) from their inaugural season in '68-'69 until 1992, when they moved into the brand new America West Arena across town. The relatively young airline was based in Phoenix and already operating under bankruptcy when it purchased the naming rights. It re-emerged thanks to re-organization in 1994, but despite being one of the first airlines to embrace e-Ticketing, the company continued to struggle and things fell apart further after 9/11 devastated the travel industry. America West merged with the also struggling US Airways in 2005, with the two companies hoping their consolidation could cut costs and improve bottom lines. The Suns opened up the '06-'07 season in the newly-named US Airways Center, but it should have been taken as an omen that their latest sponsor company was also already in bankruptcy. Sure enough, in February of 2013, US Airways announced a pending merger with American Airlines, with the new company adopting the American name and branding. Perhaps sensing that a third American Airlines branded arena (in addition the ones in Miami and Dallas) would be confusing, the airline opted not to take up naming rights, and in 2016 the location was rebranded as Talking Stick Resort Arena, after the nearby casino.
11) Shawmut Center/FleetCenter/YourGarden/Yankees Suck Garden, etc., Boston, 1995-2005
Sports arenas and stadiums are an American institution, and have become as ingrained and indelible as our vehicles, guitars and apple pies. Getting outraged over naming rights infecting sports venues is an ultimately pointless conjecture in the face of capitalism, but there is something sentimentally sad about a generation of kids growing up attached to AT&T Park instead of Candlestick, or Staples Center instead of The Forum. The Forum, which hosted the Lakers from 1967 to 1999, was doomed by its location in Inglewood, which ran anathema to Lakers ownership's grand scheme of creating a full "experience" by surrounding a new arena with shopping, dining, and night life in downtown Los Angeles. Its spiritual cousin, the Boston Garden, would not go out so quietly. Conceived and built in the late 1920s as the Madison Square Boston Garden (it was designed by the same architect as MSG in New York), two decades before the NBA was founded, it was contrived specifically for hockey and boxing. This meant basketball fans were closer to the action than at any other arena, but also meant that sight lines from the rear were terrible. There was also no air conditioning, which became part of the ultimate home court advantage. The Celtics won 16 titles at the Garden, and the banners piled up and crowded the rafters, adding to the mystique. Though the fans were willing to forgive the flaws, the owners were, of course, annoyed with the limited seating and lack of luxury boxes, and Bruins ownership essentially extorted the city into agreeing to finance a new arena by threatening to move. Ground was broken in 1993 on a new arena just inches from the site of the original Boston Garden, and the Shawmut Center was completed in 1995. The naming rights had been sold to Shawmut Bank, a Boston-area institution since 1836, who just barely outbid Fleet Bank. But before the arena was fully operational, Shawmut was bought out by Fleet, and the entire arena had to be re-designed in the interior to reflect new sponsorship. Nine years later, Fleet was bought by Bank of America, and the arena's owners started a long search for a new sponsor. In the meantime, they named the arena "YourGarden" in honor of the original Boston Garden, which had since been destroyed and turned into a parking lot (most Boston fans just referred to the new arena as "The Garden" anyway). Until a full-time sponsor could be found, a series of eBay auctions were established to sell one-day naming rights, with proceeds going towards charity. One Yankees fan paid over $2,000 to rename it "Derek Jeter Center" but arena executives were able to nix the change by deeming it "vulgarity." They did, however, approve the auction win that led to the "Yankees Suck Garden." Several eventually paid just to name it "Boston Garden" for a night, for nostalgia's sake. Eventually, TD Bank secured long-term naming rights, and the arena was renamed TD Bank Garden in an appropriate homage to the original Celtics home.
3) Sleep Train Arena, Sacramento, 2012-2016
As the three major U.S. sports all perpetually grew into big businesses in the years immediately following World War II, capitalism rendered it inevitable that owners would look for new and creative sources of revenue. The first sports stadium to bear the name of a corporation was in St. Louis, when the Cardinals’ Sportsman's Park was re-branded as Busch Stadium in 1954. The NBA was still a burgeoning league at the time, and in addition to the then iconic Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden, teams played in arenas with archaic names like Fort Wayne War Memorial Stadium and the Philadelphia Civic Center (in... you guessed it... Philadelphia). It took about 30 years for basketball arenas to start adopting naming rights, and it's generally believed to have started when the Kings moved to Sacramento in 1985 and took up residence in ARCO Arena. When the NBA initially approved the Kings relocating to the California capital from Kansas City, they failed to ensure that the new city housed an arena large enough to host professional basketball games. While waiting for a legitimate arena to be built and opened, Kings ownership settled on a large office building and warehouse as an interim solution. Needing a quick infusion of money to convert it into a basketball stadium, the owners inked a naming rights deal with ARCO, an oil company based in Southern California. Thus a former office building became the Sacramento Sports Arena and then, quickly, the ARCO Arena. The makeshift arena had no modern amenities and seated just barely north of 10,000, but sold out every game it hosted over the course of three seasons. In 1988, the new ARCO Arena opened on schedule and the original went back to its intended use as an office building (it's now the headquarters of the California Department of Consumer Affairs). The naming rights with ARCO were signed through 2007, but in 2000 the company was bought out by BP. Though the ARCO name and logo disappeared quickly for consumers, the arena not only continued to bear its name through 2007, it actually extended the deal under financial straits through 2011. When the second ARCO deal expired, the arena was christened Power Balance Pavilion, sponsored by the company that made those bracelets that claimed to use "holographic technology" to improve balance and focus, which briefly snookered a lot of pro athletes (mainly baseball players). The corporation had already found itself in legal trouble by the time it lent its name to Sacramento's arena, and in November of 2011 filed for bankruptcy. The naming rights were then sold for the '12-'13 season to Sleep Train, a California-only mattress retailer, who retained the rights until the Kings moved into the new Golden 1 Center in 2016, even though the company itself was sold to Mattress Firm in 2014.
4) Wachovia Center, Philadelphia, 2003-2010
The epitome of naming rights lament will remain the Houston Astros and Enron for the foreseeable future, but the NBA had its own awkward bank naming rights issue in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. While Lehman Brothers grabbed the biggest overall headlines and Citigroup the biggest notoriety in sports for their continued sponsorship of the New York Mets' stadium, the biggest bank to fail in the wake of the crisis was an NBA sponsor, Wachovia. Founded as First Union Bank in North Carolina in 1908, it purchased Philadelphia-based CoreStates Bank in 1998, and with it their pending naming rights to the city's new arena. The Sixers had been playing in the legendary Spectrum since 1967, but by the mid '90s the arena had become a relic, lacking proper sight lines and luxury boxes. The newly minted First Union Center opened its doors in 1998, and three years later the corporation acquired Wachovia, and the Wachovia Center was in operation by the start of the ’03-’04 season. Though it was the nation’s fourth-largest bank in 2008, Wachovia needed to be bailed out by the U.S. government after the stock market crash, and when the ’08-’09 NBA season opened, the Wachovia branding on Philadelphia's arena must have seemed like a sick joke to residents, who had approved public money to partially fund its construction a decade prior. Wells Fargo eventually swooped in and bought out Wachovia in December of that year, but the previous signage remained intact, a standing testament to Wachovia's avarice and downfall, until Wells Fargo Center was officially ordained in July of 2010. Though Wells Fargo has had its own share of recent controversy and legal trouble, the name still stands as of the ’18-’19 season.
5) MCI Center, Washington, 1997-2006
6) SBC Center, San Antonio, 2002-2006
Headquartered originally in New York but eventually moved to Washington, D.C., MCI was a landmark corporation in the dismantling of the AT&T telecommunications monopoly, but eventually got swallowed up by the newly competitive industry it fostered. It actually moved to Washington in the late '70s to better fight AT&T in the Justice Department, and in 1997 purchased the naming rights to the new basketball and hockey arena built in the city's Chinatown district. Washington re-branded itself as the Wizards in their first season in the MCI Center, a moniker that has failed to bring much luck, as the team has made just four second round playoff appearances in the 21 years since. MCI was similarly ill-fated, staking a large claim in shaky innovations, some of which were just ahead of their time (e-commerce music stores, "friends and family" plans) and some of which were just out of step with the times (1-800-COLLECT). Just one year after the MCI Center opened, the company was purchased by WorldCom and the MCI logo slowly started to disappear. By 2005, the only place it could really be found was in and around the D.C. arena, and after the bankrupt WorldCom was bought out by Verizon, the Verizon Center opened its doors for the ’06-’07 season (it eventually became the Capital One Arena in 2017). Another longtime competitor of AT&T was Southwestern Bell Corporation (SBC), which moved its headquarters to San Antonio in 1993 just as the Spurs were moving into the Alamodome. Though it was brand new and state-of-the-art at the time, the Alamodome was also intended mainly for football, and Spurs games featured poor sight lines and the quirk of a large portion of seats getting cordoned off. The new SBC Center was built and opened for the ’02-’03 season, but just two years later the company purchased AT&T and adopted its name, effectively ending the SBC brand. The arena was quickly renamed the AT&T Center in 2006.
7) Compaq Center, Houston, 1998-2003
It took four years to build, which forced the Rockets to play in the Astrodome in the meantime, but when the Summit Arena debuted in Houston in 1975 it was considered a state-of-the-art masterpiece. Twenty years later the Summit was the site of back-to-back Rockets championships, but would soon be awash in the naming rights monsoon that overtook the league in the late '90s, including a re-branding as the Compaq Center during the '98-'99 lock-out shortened season. Meanwhile, owner Leslie Alexander was simultaneously trying to secure public funds for a replacement, and finally got his wish after threatening to relocate to Louisville. While this was going on, Compaq, a Houston-based computer company that was founded in 1982 and peaked around 1996, was swiftly losing market share to rising competitors HP, Dell, and Apple. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the company essentially became insoluble and was bought out by HP in 2002. As the Compaq Center remained active as home of the Rockets for the '02-'03 season while the company logo slowly started to disappear from the market place, Alexander negotiated a deal to brand the new arena the Toyota Center (the Compaq Center in San Jose that hosts the San Jose Sharks simply transitioned its name into the HP Pavilion). The building formerly known as the Summit Arena and Compaq Center is now the home base of Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, and was briefly in the news in 2017 when the mega-pastor was slow to open his doors to local residents displaced by Hurricane Harvey.
8) EnergySolutions Arena, Salt Lake City, 2006-2016
Unlike other examples on this list where the insolvency or disintegration of a company rendered its naming rights as confusing, this is a case where the locals were embarrassed by the moniker even as the company was thriving. Opened in 1991 as the Delta Center, named after the airline that has a major hub in Salt Lake City, the arena was a replacement for the Salt Palace, where the Jazz had played for 12 years, as well as the ABA’s Utah Stars before them. When Delta declined to renew its naming rights in 2006, they were sold to EnergySolutions, a company that specializes in disposing nuclear waste. It was the first major U.S. stadium to be named after an energy company, and it drew immediate derision from fans and the media, who took to giving the arena sarcastic nicknames like “The Dump” (a reference to a radioactive waste disposal zone that EnergySolutions owns), “Glow Dome,” “Chernobowl,” and “Energy Pollutions Arena.” The naming rights changed hands again in 2015, this time getting sold to Vivint, a Provo-based home security service provider. Though the building is officially titled the Vivint Smart Home Arena, the court itself is actually called the Larry H. Miller Court, named after the longtime Jazz owner who passed away in 2010.
9) America West Arena, Phoenix, 1992-2006
10) US Airways Center, Phoenix, 2006-2014
Few industries have been as capricious in the 21st century as airlines, and Phoenix's arena musical chairs is indicative of it. The Suns played at Veterans Memorial Coliseum (which is still standing and retains its name, and now mostly functions as partial site of the Arizona State Fair) from their inaugural season in '68-'69 until 1992, when they moved into the brand new America West Arena across town. The relatively young airline was based in Phoenix and already operating under bankruptcy when it purchased the naming rights. It re-emerged thanks to re-organization in 1994, but despite being one of the first airlines to embrace e-Ticketing, the company continued to struggle and things fell apart further after 9/11 devastated the travel industry. America West merged with the also struggling US Airways in 2005, with the two companies hoping their consolidation could cut costs and improve bottom lines. The Suns opened up the '06-'07 season in the newly-named US Airways Center, but it should have been taken as an omen that their latest sponsor company was also already in bankruptcy. Sure enough, in February of 2013, US Airways announced a pending merger with American Airlines, with the new company adopting the American name and branding. Perhaps sensing that a third American Airlines branded arena (in addition the ones in Miami and Dallas) would be confusing, the airline opted not to take up naming rights, and in 2016 the location was rebranded as Talking Stick Resort Arena, after the nearby casino.
11) Shawmut Center/FleetCenter/YourGarden/Yankees Suck Garden, etc., Boston, 1995-2005
Sports arenas and stadiums are an American institution, and have become as ingrained and indelible as our vehicles, guitars and apple pies. Getting outraged over naming rights infecting sports venues is an ultimately pointless conjecture in the face of capitalism, but there is something sentimentally sad about a generation of kids growing up attached to AT&T Park instead of Candlestick, or Staples Center instead of The Forum. The Forum, which hosted the Lakers from 1967 to 1999, was doomed by its location in Inglewood, which ran anathema to Lakers ownership's grand scheme of creating a full "experience" by surrounding a new arena with shopping, dining, and night life in downtown Los Angeles. Its spiritual cousin, the Boston Garden, would not go out so quietly. Conceived and built in the late 1920s as the Madison Square Boston Garden (it was designed by the same architect as MSG in New York), two decades before the NBA was founded, it was contrived specifically for hockey and boxing. This meant basketball fans were closer to the action than at any other arena, but also meant that sight lines from the rear were terrible. There was also no air conditioning, which became part of the ultimate home court advantage. The Celtics won 16 titles at the Garden, and the banners piled up and crowded the rafters, adding to the mystique. Though the fans were willing to forgive the flaws, the owners were, of course, annoyed with the limited seating and lack of luxury boxes, and Bruins ownership essentially extorted the city into agreeing to finance a new arena by threatening to move. Ground was broken in 1993 on a new arena just inches from the site of the original Boston Garden, and the Shawmut Center was completed in 1995. The naming rights had been sold to Shawmut Bank, a Boston-area institution since 1836, who just barely outbid Fleet Bank. But before the arena was fully operational, Shawmut was bought out by Fleet, and the entire arena had to be re-designed in the interior to reflect new sponsorship. Nine years later, Fleet was bought by Bank of America, and the arena's owners started a long search for a new sponsor. In the meantime, they named the arena "YourGarden" in honor of the original Boston Garden, which had since been destroyed and turned into a parking lot (most Boston fans just referred to the new arena as "The Garden" anyway). Until a full-time sponsor could be found, a series of eBay auctions were established to sell one-day naming rights, with proceeds going towards charity. One Yankees fan paid over $2,000 to rename it "Derek Jeter Center" but arena executives were able to nix the change by deeming it "vulgarity." They did, however, approve the auction win that led to the "Yankees Suck Garden." Several eventually paid just to name it "Boston Garden" for a night, for nostalgia's sake. Eventually, TD Bank secured long-term naming rights, and the arena was renamed TD Bank Garden in an appropriate homage to the original Celtics home.