Oracle Arena may let fans show up early to watch Curry warm up
Want to get to Oracle Arena early enough to experience Steph Curry's warm-ups? Oracle Arena may start letting you.
By
Zach Harper
•
1 min read
How early would you show up to an NBA arena in order to get to watch Stephen Curry warm up for the Golden State Warriors? Standard practice at Oracle Arena is for fans to be allowed into the arena 90 minutes prior to tip-off, but you can't always get your ticket scanned, make your way to the seats, and catch the entire show of Curry warming up.
According to Ben Cohen of the Wall Street Journal, the Warriors may start letting fans in a half-hour earlier so fans can see all of Curry's warm-up routine. They may even start putting the show on the jumbotron so everybody gets a good view of his shooting and dribbling exploits that help him fine tune a game that has been electrifying the NBA for years.
Curry’s pregame shots get deeper and deeper until, at one point, he’s closer to halfcourt than the 3-point line. Fred Ortmann, an orthopedic surgeon who came with his son Wednesday, shook his head as Curry drilled one after another. “I don’t know another player with a warmup routine like this,” he said. “And we can see him better now than we can during the game.”
That is why Oracle Arena in Oakland may soon switch up its game-day operations to account for the pre-game action. For years, the doors there have unlocked for fans 90 minutes before the game—or right when Curry warms up. Now the team is thinking about opening the arena a half-hour earlier and showing Curry on the scoreboard, said Brandon Schneider, the Warriors’ senior vice president of business development.
Since I've been covering the league, the best warm-up routines in the NBA for my money are Curry, Kyle Korver, Dirk Nowitzki, and Steve Novak (trust me; he's insane during it). The top shooters always manage to dazzle those watching with picture-perfect shooting routines that make even the shots that go in but hit the rim a bit of an anomaly.
Curry's show is basically perfect, much like the majority of his play has been during the 2015-16 season. He caps it off with the shot from the tunnel at home games, which is always worthy of a hundred phones trying to post it to Vine and social media platforms as soon as it goes in, if it goes in.
