Ball Arena
Colorado
Off to your side is Ball Arena, the indoor sports and concert venue that sits near the South Platte River at the edge of lower downtown. It opened on October first, nineteen ninety-nine, designed by the firm HOK Sport at a construction cost of one hundred eighty-seven million dollars. You likely remember it as the Pepsi Center, the name it carried for its first two decades.
On October twenty-second, two thousand twenty, the naming rights went to Ball Corporation, a Broomfield-based maker of aluminum packaging, and it became Ball Arena. The partnership came with a sustainability commitment to shift concessions toward recyclable aluminum. Three professional teams call it home: the Denver Nuggets in basketball, the Colorado Avalanche in hockey, and the Colorado Mammoth in lacrosse.
Capacity is roughly nineteen thousand five hundred twenty for basketball and about eighteen thousand for hockey, with concerts reaching twenty-one thousand. Celine Dion performed the building's inaugural concert on opening night. The two thousand eight Democratic National Convention was held here.
Both the two thousand one and two thousand twenty-two Stanley Cup Finals took place on this ice. In two thousand twenty-three the Nuggets won the franchise's first championship in this building.
