Making home court a bit more like home
Selected fans will make virtual appearances as games start feeling real
Nick Nurse isn’t going to get a gentle shoulder rub from Drake, and he won’t hug some random front-row fan after a successful coach’s challenge like he did in Los Angeles earlier this year, but the Raptors coach is starting to feel the people around him.
Feel might be a stretch, because they are just faces on video boards on one side of temporary courts, but there is something of a soothing feeling to their virtual presence.
“It’s getting less quiet,” Nurse said this week. “There’s crowd noise. You can see family members and coaches’ family members and players’ family members. There is a sense of a personal touch to it.”
The idea of adding “fans” to games in otherwise empty gyms was hatched to give the NBA’s restart some kind of familiar feeling during games.
There are about 320 “seats” occupied by the visages of fans that, in the case of the Raptors, will be chosen from the team’s season-ticket base of about 15,000 when the playoffs begin later this month.
For now, team employees are working through the inevitable wrinkles in a process that’s brand new. But they expect to see regular “fans” at post-season games, meaning the likes of superfan Nav Bhatia and global ambassador Drake might be there — so to speak.
“We’re seeing familiar faces on those screens, and who knows what it’ll evolve to here two months from now” when the Raptors may be playing for their second straight championship, Nurse said.
“So I don’t want to discount the home-court thing quite yet.” The fans have become a quirky sidebar to the actual games as the NBA tries different ways to guarantee spectator involvement.
Pascal Siakam’s brother Christian showed up at one, while ex-NBA all-stars such as Chris Bosh and Paul Pierce have been shown in the celebrity section that’s set aside in the crowd.
It’s quirky and new, just like the entire campus restart is. But the NBA is being careful, too.
The league is monitoring each game, and any misbehaviour can get a fan virtually ejected. Security guards won’t invade a home and pluck people off their chairs or couches, but with one click of a button somewhere, a fan who shows an inappropriate sign, for instance, will disappear.
The seats are divided into sections. The league takes one for celebrity fans and family members of the teams involved, the brewery sponsor has a set number reserved for its use, and the rest will be distributed to fans of the teams playing — with the designated “home team” getting the bulk of the reserved, faces-only spots.
There’s no physical interaction, of course; technology hasn’t evolved that far.
But seeing familiar faces, and having the noise from supporters pumped into the arena, may give players a tiny sense that they actually are at home and not on what in effect is a sound stage for a television production.
“I’m not sure the home-court thing won’t be a little bit of an advantage, maybe,” Nurse said. “It seems like they’re tweaking a little bit more and more as they go here in the games, as they’re learning things about how to put the game on in this setting.”
The NBA is ahead of other major North American sports in its effort to normalize an abnormal situation. Arena signage at the Disney complex near Orlando is the same as in various other arenas. The sounds of a Raptors home game in Florida are much the same as a game at Scotiabank Arena.
Everyone watching knows it’s piped in and not “real,” but there is a real feel to it —right down to the volume, which is being ratcheted up as the experiment in virtual sports reality continues.
The NHL is not using covered seats in its two hub arenas to either blast advertising messages or show people cheering for their teams. And while virtual fans may not be the real thing, they are more real than the cardboard cut-outs some sports are using.
What it’s done is create noise in what could be an antiseptic environment. It’s one thing for television networks to overlay fan and arena sound for their broadcast. It’s another for players and coaches to feel like the atmosphere is a bit more normal.
“It’s evolving, or it’s changed,” said Nurse.
“It felt very quiet and things during the scrimmages. It’s getting less quiet ... it’s crowd noise and music that’s feeling more familiar, meaning that you’re a little more comfortable.
“It’s like when you’re in a real arena in a game. Players are kind of used to hearing your voice through all that stuff, and the first couple scrimmages everybody could hear everything you were saying, but it’s not really the case anymore.
“It’s getting back to (where) you can say the things that your players will pick up, I think.”
One of the big challenges for the NBA in resuming a season interrupted by the global pandemic was to make the games as close to a regular sports entertainment event as possible.
The cacophony of a typical NBA game has been reached, and will likely be louder as the games get more important, and having fans in the seats is just another step in that direction.
Not a step that’s real, but a step nonetheless.