Sports Business Journal: UBS arena at Belmont has easier load-in than NYC; Isles' owners considered revamping Barclays

A 12/6/21 Sports Business Journal article, UBS Arena striking a new chord, has a couple of passages relevant to Brooklyn. The new arena, with the New York Islanders as anchor tenant, is at Belmont Park, the western edge of Nassau County. From the article:

UBS Arena enters one of the most competitive live entertainment regions on the planet but boasts a considerable suburban space superiority over its peers, Barclays Center, Prudential Center and the inimitable Madison Square Garden. The extra room affects fans and live music performers’ in-venue experiences, and, outside, leaves plenty of room for a 350,000-square-foot retail shopping village and a future 250-key hotel that will make the site a destination beyond just hockey. And the back-of-house design is clearly an extension of OVG’s live music as a co-anchor tenant concept that it recently debuted at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.

The article points out that the loading dock is enclosed and heated "with space for 10-plus trailers and seven loading bays with direct access to the arena floor." 

Versus NYC arenas

As noted:

Compare that to MSG, where equipment and gear must be loaded onto elevators or pushed up ramps and taken up multiple levels to the event floor. Trucks and buses must park on sidewalks or wherever they can fit in the middle of Manhattan. Logistics are similar at Barclays Center, in crowded Brooklyn.

It's not quite as bad at Barclays, since there are two bays, with elevators, that lower trucks to the arena floor. But, yes, a big event can see those trucks get backed up. From the article:

Consider that Drake’s tour has 27 trucks, or Bruce Springsteen’s has 12. At UBS, they can park trucks or a tour bus in the building during the show, or at least elsewhere on-site. And the loading area is ventilated, so the tour can have a bus, which can be a valued oasis on the road for performers or crew members, running indoors.

That said, even the presence of a new LIRR station--at this point accessible only from one direction--does not make the UBS arena public transit-friendly. It does have 5,000 parking spaces.

A Barclays revamp?

There's a tidbit here about a path not taken:

Five years ago, Islanders co-owner Scott Malkin called Richard Browne and Jeff Wilpon, SPD co-founders, and said the Islanders needed a new home. A subsequent SPD [Sterling Project Development] feasibility study spanning 2016 and 2017 zeroed in on five possibilities: a full-scale renovation of Barclays Center to make it more suitable for hockey; the same for Nassau Coliseum; a site in the Long Island town of Ronkonkoma; the parking lot of Citi Field; and Belmont Park, which emerged after City Football Group’s attempt to build a soccer stadium there for its New York City Football Club fell apart.

Perhaps they figured out that the footprint of Barclays simply wouldn't accommodate a larger hockey rink, so a renovation wasn't worth it.

Competition

From the article:

Since 2013, Madison Square Garden has averaged a second-place finish in Pollstar’s global annual ranking of most tickets sold by arenas; Barclays’ average finish was seventh, out of hundreds, maybe thousands of indoor venues. UBS Arena has just one anchor sports tenant (both Barclays and MSG have two each), leaving plenty of open dates that need to be filled, especially given the venue’s price tag. Leiweke said the arena expects to host 150 events annually, including roughly 50 Islanders home games and 50 to 60 concerts.

I'm not sure the New York Liberty fully qualify as an anchor sports tenant at Barcays yet, since they've drawn less than 2,000 fans, according to NetsDaily, but could, based on past performance, exceed 10,000.

From the article:

The bands that are big enough to play MSG and make money are limited, but UBS Arena’s developers wanted to make sure it’s the second choice if there was going to be multiple New York-area stops, or even the first choice for touring acts that are more family-focused. 

That's something to keep watch on: will UBS take any of Barclays' business?

For now, the new arena seems to be doing well:

The Islanders sold out more than 12,000 season tickets and have a waiting list for the first time in team history. Premium seating sold out, and the sponsorship roster is nearly full. The ability to incorporate brands into the arena, which the Islanders couldn’t do at Nassau Coliseum or Barclays Center, arenas they didn’t own, helped the club far exceed any sponsorship revenue number it imagined pre-UBS Arena, Calka said.

But as we know from Barclays, a honeymoon period does not portend the future.