Tag: Staples Center

Lakers’ Russell Westbrook gives his thoughts on Staples Center changing name to Crypto.com Arena

See what Los Angeles Lakers star Russell Westbrook thought about the new arena name change.

The owners of the Staples Center, the building the Los Angeles Lakers have called home for more than 20 years, made a major announcement Tuesday.

After being called Staples Center since the building was opened, the stadium announced a new naming rights deal — worth $700 million — with the company Crypto.com. The venue will be called Crypto.com Arena starting Christmas Day.

READ: NBA Twitter blasts how Lakers’ Staples Center changing name to Crypto.com Arena

Lakers star Russell Westbrook gave his thoughts on the switch.

“Honestly, the business side of basketball and how deals go down, obviously as players, we don’t know exactly what happens, how it goes down,” the star guard said after Wednesday’s loss to the Milwaukee Bucks. “We kind of just see it like everybody else, like we saw it (Wednesday).”

Westbrook continued about how the moments from the building will still stay.

“But Staples Center got so many great memories, just for me as a kid growing up in L.A., so many great things have happened in that building, regardless of the name,” Westbrook said. “The building itself is still the building. And that’s what’s most important. That’s all you can think about.”

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Frank Vogel on Staples Center name change: I understand fans disappointment

Ryan Ward: Frank Vogel on Staples Center name change: “It’s tough. Lakers fans, and really sports fans in general, obviously know that building as the Staples Center. I understand the disappointment the fans will have, but that’s just the way of the world. This is the business we’re in. Almost universally around the country, there’s a business element to naming rights with arenas. It’s really out of our control.”

Is Orlando’s Robin Lopez a Boston sports fan? Or just a big man with an odd sense of humor?

The Magic center had some Boston-related sports jokes on Twitter Wednesday.

Could it be that Orlando Magic big man Robin Lopez is a fan of Boston sports teams? After news broke that Staples Center, the home arena of the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers, will soon be known as “Crypto.com Arena” after the eponymous website for trading cryptocurrency purchased the naming rights to the arena, Lopez took to Twitter with some jokes as many did on Wednesday.

“Slightly disappointed AEG/Crypto.com Arena outbid the city of Boston, who was going to rename Staples Center ‘(expletive) The Lakers Go Pats’ Performing Arts Center,” jested the longtime Celtics foil, who is known to have a sense of humor to match his considerable size as a human being.

Whether it’s a dig at Bostonian sports fans — known to be among the most gung-ho around the league — or an admission on the part of Lopez he’d actually have preferred such a name, he was one of very many to make jokes about the awkward name for the new arena which certainly doesn’t roll off of one’s tongue.

This post originally appeared on Celtics Wire. Follow us on Facebook!

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Vanessa Bryant had the perfect reaction to Staples Center’s name change

This is just too perfect.

The Staples Center won’t be the Staples Center anymore once Christmas arrives.

From that point on, the arena will be known officially as Crypto.com Arena which, to be completely honest, is not what most of us will be calling it.

Vanessa Bryant certainly won’t. That’s for sure.

Bryant chimed in on the new name change for the arena her husband, Kobe Bryant, built out a Hall of Fame career in. And she probably picked the best name for it out of anyone.

It wasn’t Crypto.com arena or The Crypt, as some folks have already started calling it online. It wasn’t even the Staples Center.

She called it “The House that Kobe Built.” And that’s just perfect.

Somebody start the paperwork. This needs to be a thing and it needs to be a thing now. Officially.

Get on this, Lakers.

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You’re a weirdo if you ever call it Crypto.com Arena. It’s the Staples Center.

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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NBA Twitter blasts how Lakers’ Staples Center is changing name to Crypto.com Arena

The NBA world hates how Staples Center, home of the Los Angeles Lakers, is changing its name to Crypto.com Arena.

AEG and Crypto.com announced Tuesday that Staples Center, home of the Los Angeles Lakers, will soon have a new name: Crypto.com Arena.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the deal is worth $700 million over 20 years, making it one of the biggest naming rights deals in history.

The arena will be called Staples Center until Dec. 25 when the switch will take effect. All of the Staples Center signage will be removed by June 2022.

The deal has made NBA Twitter erupt. The NBA spectrum has a wide range of emotions about the move, especially because Staples Center has been the name since the arena opened in 1999. Many memories have since transpired in the building involving legends like Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal.

Here are some reactions from NBA Twitter:

It’s a sad day for a sad office supplies store that still has plenty of sad deals

It’s a tough day for fans of office chairs, manilla folders and desk pad calendars.

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I never thought I’d see the day where so many people are bummed out – and even upset! – about the name of an old office supplies store being kicked to the curb but here we are and I can’t stop laughing about it.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it was reported last night that the Staples Center in Los Angeles – which is home to the Lakers, Clippers, Sparks, and Kings – will soon be going by the name Crypto.com Arena.

Yup, it’s a tough day for a chain of boring stores that is currently celebrating a holiday deal on office chairs on its website. There is nothing more exciting in sports than a good deal on office chairs! Also, who doesn’t look forward to a trip to their favorite office supplies store!?

Many sports fans in Los Angeles haven’t been taking this news well. Nostalgia over a store that currently has a very good deal on copy paper is currently at an all-time high, with fans being very vocal about how they’ll always call their city’s arena the name it has been since Day 1 – Staples, where you can get a ton of manilla folders at a pretty good price.

Part of me gets it – change can be hard. I grew up in Boston and we had the Boston Garden. Then we had the FleetCenter, named after what used to be a local bank. Then it was named after another bank. And I think it’s still named after a bank but I’m not entirely sure because who can really care about the name of an arena or stadium?

I mean, the New England Patriots play in a stadium named after a company that specializes in the wild world of razors and shaving cream and nobody really cares because names of arenas and stadiums no longer matter. They are just places where we go to have fun and that amount of fun isn’t affected at all by whatever silly corporate title sits on top of it.

There are many other sports stadiums that go buy meaningless names, too – names of companies of all different types (Minute Maid Park in Houston is a favorite of mine… who can’t get excited about juice?!) that pay a bunch of money to have their name be used every time there’s a game being played there. I guess it’s a good thing for businesses because heck, Staples is still around and currently offering really good deals on desk pad calendars and printers (as low as $109!?) so something has to be good about these naming rights.

Fans in LA will get over this in time. Many will proudly call it Staples for years to come. Others will just stop calling it by any name and continue to go to games and have just as much fun as before.

Life goes on. Games go on. Stadiums go on.

But seriously, did you know Staples offers free delivery on all ink and toner (with no minimum charge required)? They can never take that away from you, Los Angeles. Well, they probably can, but whatever. Today that offer stands and today is all we have.

Free ink and toner delivery for everyone!

I just wish Circuit City had come back and threw in a bid because the Circuit City Center would have been the gosh darn coolest.

Quick hits: Early NFL awards… Special goal for Philadelphia’s Kevin Hayes… Meet the Kansas fan who went viral… And more.

Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports

– Charles McDonald hands out some NFL awards, including a MVP award going to an AFC QB.

– Flyers forward Kevin Hayes celebrated his first goal of the season with a touching tribute to his late brother, Jimmy Hayes.

– Blake Schuster caught up with the Kansas football fan who went viral last weekend with his reactions during the team’s upset of Texas.

– Charles Curtis has 7 fantasy football players you should buy low on and trade for as your season heads towards the playoffs.

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The Staples Center will be Crypto.com Arena and L.A. fans had so many reactions

Fans had nicknames and are probably sticking with the original name.

The Staples Center is getting a new name, ending an era in Los Angeles that’s lasted decades.

In its place? Crypto.com Arena.

Starting this Christmas Day on Dec. 25 — when the Los Angeles Lakers and Brooklyn Nets face off — the name will switch for the first time since 1999.

How did fans feel about that? I’d call it a mix. Some had a pretty good new nickname for the arena … and others are just going to keep on calling it the Staples Center, where some legends have taken the court and ice.

Here’s a sampling of the mixed reaction from around Twitter: