INGLEWOOD, Calif. — With a little more than three minutes left in the first half on Sunday night, Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James stepped to the free throw line, as he’s done thousands of times in his NBA career. But this night was different. James was visiting the Intuit Dome, the new home of the LA Clippers.
James didn’t think it would be different for his first visit to Inglewood. After all, he’s played games in Seattle and New Jersey before teams moved to different homes.
“It will be just like going to any new arena,” James said Friday night. “The same as when Golden State moved from Oracle. It will be the same when anybody else had a new arena.”
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James had made two free throws earlier in the game. So did teammate Anthony Davis, who made free throws despite giant cardboard cutouts of fans shaving his signature unibrow.
But this instance saw James miss almost everything on his attempt.
It was one of only two missed free throws for the Lakers, but it came at a moment when the Clippers held the Lakers without a field goal during the last 6:02 of the second quarter and took a double-digit lead that they would not relinquish for the rest of the game. The Clippers cruised to a 116-102 victory Sunday in the first regular-season meeting between the two Los Angeles teams outside of a shared arena in 25 years.
The two most recent Clippers games at Intuit Dome have had muted attendance because of the wildfires disaster, as well as the Lakers having home games the same night as the Clippers this week. Home attendance for the Clippers this season has only averaged 16,205, a league-low, despite the impressive new venue. But Sunday’s crowd was a sellout of 17,927, and the lively arena was certainly something new to Lakers players, if not necessarily James himself.
“I thought the fans were great,” Lakers guard Austin Reaves said. “I thought, obviously I don’t get to walk around and see everything else other than the court, watching the big jumbo, you know, big whatever the 360 screen in the middle. But I think it’s a very nice arena.”
Intuit Dome was built to be as hostile to visiting NBA teams as possible. The primary feature: The Wall, a stack of 51 rows uninterrupted by suites (or multi-platform media companies founded by James and Maverick Carter) situated at the baseline of the visiting team’s bench. The objective of The Wall is that it is populated only by certified Clippers fans.
“The Wall changed the game,” says Darian Vaziri, 26, a content creator and youth sports coach from Los Angeles who was in attendance on The Wall Sunday night. “It just gives us an opportunity to start chants and set the tone for our arena. Laker fans were being either kicked out or asked to remove their Laker jerseys or jackets in The Wall. It was heavier security than ever tonight. It almost felt like tonight was what the Wall was created for.
“And also, the Lakers did have at least 40 percent of the crowd if I had to guess, but you couldn’t really hear them too much due to the way the game went.”
Fly on The Wall! Opening night and opposing fans in LA Clippers’ Intuit Dome eyepopping section
The cacophony of Lakers fans competing with Clippers fans peaked when the Lakers cut a 26-point third quarter Clippers lead down to 15 to end the period, and down to 11 with 4 1/2 minutes left to play. But the Clippers were never threatened, and by the end of the game, Lakers starter Max Christie was being guarded by his brother, rookie Cam Christie of the Clippers, while James’ son Bronny played the rest of the game.
“It’s a good idea,” Reaves said of The Wall. “It kind of gives you more of like a college atmosphere to where … I don’t even really want to elaborate on it. So yeah…”
When asked if the fan and arena noise affected him, Reaves didn’t elaborate.
“I don’t really have an answer for that,” Reaves said.
The arena was so expansive that multiple Lakers players got lost on their way out when trying to find the players’ parking lot.
It’s not the territory that the Lakers are used to. For 25 years, the Clippers and the Lakers shared the building that opened as STAPLES Center in downtown Los Angeles in 1999. The Lakers had the coziest road games in the league; even when they “visited” the Clippers, it felt like a Lakers arena dressed up in Clippers colors.
The best attempt to address that was when Doc Rivers was hired as head coach and senior vice president of the Clippers in 2013. Rivers brought current Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue with him as an assistant, and he traded for current Lakers head coach JJ Redick to be his starting shooting guard. Rivers also decided to cover the Lakers’ championship banners and retired numbers with massive portraits of current Clippers players for all Clippers home games, an arrangement that stayed in place for the remainder of the Clippers’ time hosting games in downtown LA.
“Listen, I think this is our arena when we play,” Rivers said in 2013. “No disrespect to them. But when we play, it’s the Clippers’ arena as far as I know.”
So instead of looking up at player portraits, opponents are staring at The Wall.
Redick, who played for the Clippers from 2013 through 2017 at the peak of Lob City, said he got to Intuit Dome at 2 p.m., earlier than his typical pregame arrival time, to marvel at the arena. He credited Clippers chairman Steve Ballmer as “truly being one of the best owners in sports.”
“Great atmosphere,” Redick said afterward. “Just a great setup. … Truly a fun place to play in. And obviously being Lakers-Clippers, it was a great atmosphere. You felt the juice. You felt the energy. It was fun.”
It’s been a rough season for visiting Intuit Dome shooters, as they have made only 73.3 percent of free throws, second-worst of any arena in the league (visitors to the Rockets’ Toyota Center have made only 71.4 percent from the line). Three teams — the Raptors, Warriors and Nuggets — have lost games at Intuit Dome while missing more free throws than the final margin of defeat.
Free throws were the least of the Lakers’ problems overall Sunday. Lue, who won two championships with the franchise, has coached 16 games against the Lakers as the Clippers head coach. His Clippers team has led at the end of the first quarter all 16 times, and is now 13-3 against the Lakers. A game like Sunday was another reminder of the full circle Lue has enjoyed in his NBA career as a player and coach.
“It’s where it all started for me,” Lue said of Inglewood, where the Clippers currently play and where the Lakers played when Lue was a rookie in the 1998-99 NBA season, the final one for the Lakers at the Forum. “Coming to L.A., 20, 21 years old, just fall in love with the city, everything it stood for. Coming back to Inglewood now playing, it’s just like damn, right down the street is where it all started for me. And I’ve come back full circle, 27 years later. I’m back again. So it feels good.”
The presence of the Lakers is why Intuit Dome even exists. The Lakers moved from Minneapolis, where they won five pre-shot clock championships, in 1960. They played at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, located about five miles south of downtown Los Angeles, until their first game at the Forum on Dec. 31, 1967. The Clippers franchise originated as the Buffalo Braves in upstate New York in 1970 before relocating to Southern California as the San Diego Clippers in 1978. The only championship the Lakers won in Los Angeles before the Clippers’ arrival to San Diego was in 1972.
The Lakers went on to win two championships (1980, 1982) while the Clippers were in San Diego. The rivalry got closer in 1984, when the Clippers left San Diego for Los Angeles and played at the Lakers’ old home at the Sports Arena. The Lakers won a championship immediately in 1985, the Clippers’ first season in Los Angeles, and went back-to-back in 1987 and 1988 while the Clippers were in the midst of what was a franchise-defining 15-year postseason drought.
The Clippers played several games in the 1990s in Anaheim, hosting the Lakers three times (a win in 1997, and losses in 1998 and 1999). But rather than relocate to Orange County, the Clippers agreed to join the Lakers and the Los Angeles Kings at STAPLES Center in time for the 1999-2000 season. The arrangement made the Clippers a third tenant (after the Lakers and the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings), with the Lakers getting preferential dates and game times compared to the Clippers on an annual basis. The Lakers went on to win a championship in the first year at STAPLES Center, and six titles total while sharing an arena with the Clippers.
“It is, in a way, a historic meeting,” longtime retired Clippers broadcaster Ralph Lawler texted to The Athletic. “The Lakers have always had all the key cards in the deck. First it was LA over San Diego, and then the Forum over the L.A. Sports Arena, then the feeling they were ‘letting’ the Clippers be a third-ranking tenant in ‘their’ Staples Center home for 25 years.”
But now, the Clippers have broken from the history of sharing an arena with the Lakers or occupying their former buildings, even if Intuit Dome is in an old Lakers neighborhood. Intuit Dome is a place that has energized Clippers players, such as Kawhi Leonard.
“We didn’t have our own arena, our own – even a locker room there, being either the third or fourth important team in the building,” said Leonard in September of the change from downtown Los Angeles to Intuit Dome. “With scheduling and everything, it helps. You know, just get comfortable and just feel like a home base for you rather than you being a roommate.”
There will be plenty more Lakers-Clippers games. The two teams play three more times this season, including one more time at Intuit Dome. To the players and coaches, it won’t be as big a deal to the fans.
“Same, I mean, this game is like any other game for me,” Leonard said after this edition of Lakers-Clippers Sunday night. “Whoever it is on the other side of the court.”
But that’s perhaps easier to say afterward. They certainly felt a different game in this new chapter of this civic rivalry.
“It was great, it felt like home,” Lue said after the game. “For introductions, when they were booing the Lakers. Fans were into it when our guys were introduced. And to start the game, our fans were into it. Not until they made their run, Lakers fans – they weren’t that many in there – but they got kind of loud. But other than that, I thought our fans were tremendous. Support was there. And like I said, just feels good to have a place to call home and yours.”
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(Photo of LeBron James and Kawhi Leonard: Jevone Moore / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
