Footprint Center

Footprint Center opened in 1992 as America West Arena, one of the first venues in the country designed specifically for NBA basketball rather than adapted from a hockey or multipurpose template. The 17,071-seat arena was a pioneer in its era, featuring an asymmetric seating bowl, extensive club and suite levels, and a downtown Phoenix location that was intended to catalyze urban development in a city whose sprawling geography had historically resisted density. In many ways, the building was ahead of its time — an arena built around the fan experience at a moment when most NBA teams still played in cavernous, characterless boxes.

The arena's name has changed repeatedly — America West, US Airways Center, Talking Stick Resort Arena, PHX Arena, and now Footprint Center — a parade of corporate sponsors that has left some fans simply calling it "the arena downtown." But through every rebranding, the building's role as the Suns' home has remained constant, and its walls hold memories from every era of franchise history since the early 1990s.

The Steve Nash years transformed the arena into one of the most entertaining stages in basketball. From 2004 to 2010, Nash and Mike D'Antoni's "Seven Seconds or Less" offense turned Suns games into kinetic art — fast breaks, three-pointers, and a style of play so ahead of its time that the rest of the league eventually adopted it as orthodoxy. The arena during those years was joyful and loud, the crowd riding every Nash-to-Amar'e Stoudemire alley-oop with genuine delight. That the Nash era never produced a championship remains one of the great what-ifs in NBA history, and the building carries that bittersweet legacy in its bones.

The 2021 Finals brought Footprint Center back to the championship stage for the first time in nearly three decades. Chris Paul and Devin Booker led the Suns to a 2-0 series lead over Milwaukee before the Bucks stormed back, and the arena's deflation in Games 5 and 6 was palpable. Close, but not close enough — a recurring theme in franchise history. The building has since entered a new era under owner Mat Ishbia, who purchased the team in 2023 and has announced ambitious renovation plans to modernize the venue and its surroundings.

Footprint Center persists as downtown Phoenix's basketball anchor — a building that helped invent the modern NBA arena experience and continues to evolve alongside the city it calls home.