You can call the place whatever you want to, and if you want to call it Crypto Dot Com Arena, that’s a little bonkers.
After Dec. 25, the Staples Center will technically no longer have the same name. But that building will never truly be the Crypto.com Arena.
It will always be known as the Staples Center, no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars Crypto.com paid for the naming rights. The home of the Los Angeles Sparks, Los Angeles Lakers, L.A. Clippers and Los Angeles Kings is the Staples Center.
As sportswriters, when we refer to the arena, we may have some obligation to call it by its new title. Unless you happen to work there, though, you won’t be held to those same standards. You can call the place whatever you want to, and if you want to call it Crypto Dot Com Arena, that’s a little bonkers.
Obviously, such rabid devotion to an office supplies store that still has plenty of sad deals is unnecessary. It’s not about loyalty to the store (somewhere I have no concrete memories of ever going into during my decades of living in Los Angeles because it’s so boring) itself.
In fact, I’d bet a decent chunk of people living in L.A. thought that the building was named after literal staples that fasten multiple pieces of paper together. Honestly, Long Beach-born rapper Vince Staples is so entertaining when he talks about hoops that you could have convinced me the arena was named after him.
I have no emotional attachment to the actual Staples store because, let’s be honest, how could anyone? What I do know, though, is that I have countless memories at the Staples Center.
I know that is where I was when I watched Kobe Bryant score 81 points in a game. I know I was at Staples Center when I watched the Lakers blow a 24-point lead against the Boston Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals. I know that I have had countless bacon-wrapped hot dogs from street vendors outside of Staples Center on the way back to the car after games.
Staples, back in 2009, became the first company to ever buy the lifetime naming rights to a major market arena. To surrender those rights, they’ve obviously gotta be down bad.
As a society, we have to come to terms with the fact that something only has value if we give it value.
No one would have paid any money for GIFs of basketball highlights or any other NFT if enough people hadn’t collectively decided that they were worth something. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that literally started as a joke and now the market cap is somewhere around $31 billion.
What I’m trying to say is that nothing means anything until we decide that it means something. This place is only going to be known as Crypto Dot Com Arena (it really doesn’t roll off the tongue, my goodness) if people buy in and agree to call it that.
Whenever someone in L.A. drives past the building when they’re passing through downtown, or more realistically stuck in traffic on the freeway, they know that they’re looking at Staples. They can put a new sign on the building if it gets them $700 million. But we don’t have to strip away the history of the building by calling it something as awkward as Crypto Dot Com Arena.
If you do, though, can you at least agree to drop the “Dot Com” from the name and just call it Crypto Arena? It’s cleaner.
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