The Fan Hub

I don't know if you heard, but a lot of things happened at the Staples Center this weekend. They had six playoff games in 4 days (about 80 hours), three of which started within a 24-hour period from Saturday to Sunday as the Lakers, Kings, and Clippers all hosted games in succession, A basketball court was converted to a block of frozen water, and then changed to a different basketball court. As if that wasn't enough, the AMGEN Tour of California, something I've never heard of but is called "America's largest cycling race," ended about 30 minutes before the Kings game started, right in front of the Staples Center. Die hard LA fans (all 100 of them) were going out of their minds trying to get tickets to every game, and the bandwagon fans were pretending to be as excited as the die hard fans so they could get tickets and be seen at every game.

According to ESPN, 250,000 people went through the Staples Center from Thursday thru Sunday. They sold over 21,000 hot dogs, 6,000 bags of peanuts, 2,500 pounds of chicken wings, 100,000 beers and 3 HP 12A black toner cartridges. 1,750 employees worked each game, including 4 employees that hang around in between games to see if anyone needs any office supplies or to make copies of anything. (Staples: yeah, we got that.)

This is not a photograph but actually a video feed of the United Center this past weekend.

What gets ignored in all of this are the arenas across the country that had no sporting events to speak of this weekend. The arenas where fans are done hoping for playoff games were instead treated to a stage production of "Tyler Perry's Madea Gets a Job" or a performance by Il Divo, "the world's foremost classical crossover quartet" (these are both real things that happened at arenas in Buffalo and Toronto, respectively). Many other arenas were completely vacant.

While the Staples Center tries to shed minutes off of the 2 hours and 15 minutes it takes to convert their hockey rink to a basketball court, United Center workers in Chicago know they'll have at least 4 months to make the same transition. Teams that don't make the playoffs or don't go as far as expected lose millions of dollars and are left scrambling to find other events to fill the arenas. Here's a list of six of those unfortunate places, along with real events they're hosting and ideas for other events they should take into consideration to make up some of that revenue…

Chris Burns is a comedian, writer and producer based in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter @chrisburns to get show updates and weird jokes