“DUCKS FLY TOGETHER!” – D2, The Mighty Ducks

Arena: Honda Center (1993)

Location: Suburban Disneyland, Anaheim, California

Game Attended: January 31, 2020 vs Tampa Bay

Game Result: 4-2 Lightning Win, Holy Nikita Kucherov Snipe

Seat Location: Upper Level Corner, Ducks Shoot 1x End

Overall Impression: A Suburban Arena, Not a City Arena

 

Flights to Los Angeles: $210

A pair of hockey tickets: $84

Parking at Honda Center: $20

Great hockey with great friends: Priceless!

 

One of my favorite and most rewarding aspects of the Tour de NHL has been the ability to share my love of hockey with new and old friends.

Take my buddy Nick, for instance: we were classmates from our earliest days at Makefield Elementary School all the way through high school. We went our separate ways in college and he now lives in Los Angeles and works in the star-studded world of television and film. So when the 2019-20 season schedule came out last summer, I first booked a trip to go visit Nick and his family in California to knock two Episodes off the Tour. I was even more excited to hear Nick was excited to join me for a pair of games!

So after a quick tour of the Fox Studios in Hollywood, we got in the car (LA traffic and all), and headed south to Anaheim!

Honda Center was built in the early 1990s when the NHL awarded Disney a franchise named after the famous Mighty Ducks movie franchise. And while you may never put Southern California and hockey in the same sentence, Honda Center is actually a pretty nice arena with some of the nicest concourses I’ve seen so far.

 

It’s a towering building – even sitting upstairs it felt like a very tall and steep building. Our view from the fourth row upstairs was quite good, though I can’t imagine being much higher up. And the seats upstairs were quite old and starting to wear down, though the lower level bowl seats were much more comfortable.

The Ducks haven’t had a good season at all, so fan support wasn’t the best. There were some standard Let’s Go Ducks chants throughout the night, but not much else in terms of fan excitement. Unless, of course, you count the “First Intermission 500”.

We also didn’t get a chance to explore the surrounding area outside Honda Center, but there didn’t appear to be much to do, save a couple restaurants/bars. The neighborhood reminded me a lot of Philadelphia and Long Island: drive to the game, park, watch, and leave. I think Nick put it best on the way home: “the Ducks are a suburban team, not a city team.”

So without having lofty expectations of my visit to Honda Center, I’d say the game and the arena met those expectations. Would I rush back to see another game there? Probably not, but I wasn’t outright disappointed either. After all, how can you go wrong enjoying a great hockey game with a great friend?

 

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