Utah’s Delta Center With First-Ever Seating Tech For NHL And NBA

As Ryan Smith, owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz, the NHL’s Utah Mammoth and the home arena of both, Salt Lake City’s downtown Delta Center, continues to draw more people into the city with his growing Smith Entertainment Group footprint, he’s also doing something never done in an arena hosting basketball and hockey: creating a seating system that works equally well for both sports.

While focused more on engineering know-how and geometry-rich understanding than fanciful new construction, what Smith is currently doing inside the first phase of a Delta Center renovation will reshape the entire in-arena experience and create a venue that he tells me can equally support the needs of both basketball and hockey.

It all starts with an arena floor raised two feet and a first-of-its-kind riser system that moves both vertically and horizontally.

The Delta Center was built for basketball. Opened in 1991, it features one of the steepest seating bowls in the NBA. “If you’re in the fourth row, it feels like you are right there,” Smith tells me. “It is very vertical.” It’s so renowned for its design, Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Balmer made at least seven visits to the site when constructing his new Intuit Dome in California, Smith says. But what works for basketball doesn’t always work for hockey.

An NHL rink is 106 feet longer than an NBA court. Smith says that means fans in the upper bowl, thanks to how steep the arena is for hoops, don’t always have a great sightline—if any at all—to the hockey goals. And the lower bowl can be quite tricky too. “It is a real geometry challenge,” he says. “How do you adjust without losing one of the most iconic venues in sports, which is the Delta Center for basketball?”

Smith wanted to do something different. Instead of the typical arena that hosts both sports simply making the first few rows for basketball portable—and quite flat—before reaching the permanent seating that also works with hockey, the team engineered a lift and riser system that meshes with both sports.

Created by Michigan-based StageRight, the triple-action scissor lift moves forward and back, up and down, offering a 12-foot variance in elevation between rink and court endlines for optimal sightlines, twice as tall as any other arena riser system. Every seat in the lower bowl will now have a complete view of the ice and the configuration also adds capacity behind the goals and above and around the venue tunnels in the lower bowl’s north and south sides. It all comes without losing the steepness basketball fans enjoy.

MORE: Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium: A Modern-Day Multi-Purpose Venue

What’s distinct about what Gary Bettman, NHL commissioner, calls “unique, revolutionary, very specific to this building” to create ideal sightlines with an intimate seating bowl is the verticality of the system. By raising the arena floor two feet it gained the venue the geometry it needed to install the 68 retractable lifts for hockey and 80 for basketball that now features 29 rows of retractable seating for baseball stretching over 28 feet.

While most venues hosting both sports have a portable system covering the first few rows, the new Delta Center system doubles or triples that, improving on technology that hasn’t changed in the last 30 years. Smith says the fresh design has more flexibility, akin to a “transformer,” where the seats can go in multiple directions, moving one way to accommodate the needs of basketball and another for hockey, calling it a “multi-dimensional” approach to a riser system. In fact, there’s a literal push-button operation to create different configurations for basketball, hockey and concerts. “That’s no easy task,” Bettman says. “In fact, I don’t know if anyone has been able to do it as well as this building is going to do.”

On the first day of the NHL and NBA offseason Smith brought in a crane to help create phase one of the retrofit, the entire lower-bowl change. That crane is still there plugging away toward an Oct. 2 opening of the new system with a Mammoth preseason game (the Jazz play its first preseason game in the venue on Oct. 13).

“It is pretty cool,” Smith says. “You’ll see the difference. It really gets high. Our whole goal is we want to create an amazing experience for both groups. We don’t want one to sacrifice and I think we have threaded an incredible needle here. What we have done in the lower bowl is game changing. We have created and maintained this incredible basketball experience that we have and done something super unique for hockey.”

This summer’s work required removal of around five million pounds of arena concrete to make way for the new steel system housing the risers while lengthening the arena bowl about 12 feet at each end (24 feet total), raising the floor two feet and installing a new ice floor slab.

Smith says introducing the new system to fans is coming soon, but he’s hoping the basketball fans don’t notice anything different—except a new parking structure and other upgrades outside the venue—but that hockey fans will enjoy their new view onto the sport.

Smith isn’t done. Phases two and three are coming in the next two offseasons. After the next two phases, which reconfigures seating in the upper bowl and adds a new main entrance toward the outdoor plaza, capacity for hockey with a full view of the ice will increase from 11,000 last year and 14,000 this year to over 17,000. Basketball capacity jumps about 800 to 19,000.

MORE: How Sports Embraces Cheese Sponsorships, The New Stadium Cheddar

The upgrades inside Delta Center coincide with Smith’s goal to draw new fans into downtown Salt Lake City, and he recently announced plans for a nearby 6,500-seat Live Nation entertainment venue. “It is pretty powerful what is happening in downtown Salt Lake,” he says, noting the addition of the 40-plus home games in hockey and the new venue will bring millions of fans downtown, something “you can’t even quantify.”

Fans flocking to the entertainment venues breeds further development, from hotels and beyond. “Watching this transformation is pretty amazing,” Smith says. “We are really activating a lot of different things [with the venues] and using these teams as a catapult to create a way more family-friendly downtown and open an aperture of what a sporting event is, so people aren’t just coming here at 6 [p.m.], but are here a lot longer. It can be pretty powerful.”