Shaq Attack

Phil and I were offered free tickets for tonight’s Atlanta Hawks preseason game against the Miami Heat at Philips Arena, and with the possibility of seeing Shaquille O’Neal added onto the whole free tickets thing, we jumped on it…

So we took the short drive down the I-75 to Downtown Atlanta, found a sweet parking spot across from the CNN Center, met our contact in CNN, swiped the free tickets and went our merry way, after eating a damn fine (and filling) meal at the Jock & Jill’s Sports Grill located in the CNN Center… Philips Arena (which opened in 1999) stands on the site of the old Omni Arena (which was demolished in 1997) and is a fabulous arena, Atlanta is spoiled with great sporting facilities in Turner Field, Philips Arena and the Georgia Dome, and it has a unique configuration by having 5 levels of luxury boxes stacked on one side of the arena as opposed to circling the arena.

Anyways, onto the match, the Heat led from the tip off (scoring the first 6 points) and went on to win with a rather convincing 113-82 rout, with O’Neal and Dwyane Wade leading the scoring with 19 points a piece.

To be honest, we weren’t there to support the Hawks or anything like that, Phil and I are fans of basketball in general and have a line of thinking that goes like so… Atlanta Hawks are a crap team, they might be “on the bubble” as far as low seedings for the playoffs go, but they are not going to be overly successful, and because of this hardly anyone goes to see them play… BUT every team must play in Atlanta at least once… So we can pretty much pick and choose which teams we do want to see. Clever huh? We thought so too… Plus if we can bag free tickets for it, well, thats a bonus. Our tickets for this game we located just behind one of the baskets, 10 rows off the floor so they were not too bad.

But wait… Here come the obligatories y’all… The Philips Arena looking pretty empty before the game and reasonably full, about 2/3 or so, during the game…