Washington DC

I recently got to play on the basketball courts inside the Capital One Arena (formerly known as the Verizon Center) and it was an incredible experience. Yes, I know, travelers who want to play pickup basketball here may never have the chance to, but this experience was far too great for me not to write about it, so consider this a special edition (plus I just wanted to brag a bit).

For those who don’t know, Capital One Arena is home to many professional DC teams including the NBA’s Washington Wizards and WNBA’s Washington Mystic. Although the arena can hold over 20,000 spectators, I will admit we did not fill the entire arena…or actually no where close to capacity (maybe 200 people). But none the less, playing on the center court with the lights shining on you makes it as close as it gets to the NBA for me.

The reason I got to play on the home court of the Washington Wizards was because the Wizards were rewarding their season ticket holders for the first time with a fun 32 team, single elimination, 5 on 5 basketball tournament, and one of my friends just happened to be a season ticket holder. The Wizards have ~10,000 season ticket holders and to be one of the 32 selected was an accomplishment already. Each season ticket holder selected could make their own team with whoever they wanted and I was lucky enough to be considered one of the top 5 basketball people my friend knew haha

Because they needed to fit all the games within a 4-hour time frame, all games were quick, up to 7 with 1’s and 2’s, or whoever was winning after 10 minutes. They utilized both the main center court and the side practice court for games so there were always 2 games going on simultaneously. Because it was single elimination, there were a lot of unfortunate teams who only got a taste of the practice court before losing their first game and never experiencing the main court. And as expected…we had to play our first game on the practice court as well.

The competition level ranged from NBDL talent, to old school AND1 stars, to the regular old joes. Depending on your first-round draw, you could have been playing a superstar team, or a team who’s just there to have fun. I think we were a step above the regular joes, and luckily for us, we got to match up with another regular team in the first round. We were not going to squander our opportunity to play on the center court next, so we took the game probably way too seriously and handedly defeated our opponents 7-1.

This set us up with our next game on the center court, and I will tell you it’s kind of a surreal feeling. I have never played in such a large arena, and the setup was as ‘game like’ as possible. We got to play on the courts with the arena lights, scoreboard, shot clock and PA announcer. Only thing missing were the cameras and instant replay videos…

Our main court game was as competitive as any. We weren’t the best of teams, but we sure didn’t want to disappoint on the center court with everyone watching. The other team started off fast with three 3 pointers to take a 6-2 lead, but our defense shut them down the rest of the way pushing it to a 6-6 tie before going into sudden death overtime. We played an additional 8 minutes of overtime basketball before we hit our game winning shot to send us to the next round. You can only imagine the testosterone levels rise during this game because it got extremely chippy, physical and name calling was at an all time high.

In our final game, we matched up with the eventual runner ups, featuring a former NBDL player and 4 others who could throw it down. We held our ground for maybe the first minute of the game when we were actually up 3-2, before getting annihilated the rest of the way. There was nothing we could do to stop their dunking and alley oops, but by this time, we had already exceeded expectations and were happy to leave the arena with that loss.

All in all, this was an incredible opportunity to play on an NBA teams home court and I now know what it feels like to be an NBA player dribbling the ball up court, staring at the scoreboards, or even just looking up at the bottom of the giant jumbotron…minus the $50 million contract and 19,800 fans but whatever…this is a court that I will never forget.