Little Caesars Arena

• 1. Introduction

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  Little Caesars Arena stands in Midtown Detroit, built at a cost of $862.9 million. It replaced two older buildings at once. One was Joe Louis Arena, longtime home of the Detroit Red Wings. The other was The Palace of Auburn Hills, where the Detroit Pistons had played. Both franchises moved under a single roof. The arena's ambitions reached further still. It was meant to anchor a $2.1 billion, 650,000 square foot sports and entertainment district called The District Detroit. Plans called for new homes, shops, and restaurants ringed around it, along the Cass Corridor. In 2026, PWHL Detroit of the Professional Women's Hockey League will move in. A WNBA franchise for Detroit is set to follow in 2029. How rare was it for two rival teams to share one arena? And what became of the sprawling district promised around it?

• 2. A Building Turned Inside Out

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  HOK designed the arena around what its own materials call a deconstructed layout, splitting the building into separate pieces. Restaurants, retail outlets, the box office, and the Red Wings' offices sit outside the arena bowl. A glass roof stretches between those buildings and the bowl itself. That roof forms an indoor street that doubles as the arena's concourse, open year round even when no event is inside. An outdoor plaza with a large video display sits alongside it.

  Below that street, the bowl itself drops 40 feet under street level across eight stories. It seats 19,515 for hockey and 20,332 for basketball, plus a gondola level suspended above the regular stands. A 37,300 square foot practice rink sits inside the arena as well. It serves the Red Wings, plus the Little Caesars AAA Hockey Club and the Little Caesars Amateur Hockey League.

  Christopher Ilitch pointed to Montreal's Bell Centre as one of the arena's biggest design influences. He called the finished design "revolutionary" and suggested it might shape how other cities build arenas next. Above the ice, a centerhung scoreboard measures 5,100 square feet. It is joined by 45 LED displays covering more than 13,500 square feet, and over 16.5 million individual LEDs.

  One relic did not survive the move. The goal horn used at Joe Louis Arena from 1995 to 2017 stayed behind. Its acoustics would not have carried in the new building, and there was no safe way to store the compressed nitrogen gas that powered it. An amplified recording played over the speakers instead, drawing mixed reactions from Red Wings fans. The arena installed a new horn matching the old model ahead of the 2023-24 season, this one running on compressed air rather than nitrogen.

• 3. The Vision For The District

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  In December 2012, Olympia Entertainment announced plans for a new downtown district built around offices, homes, and what it called a state of the art, multi purpose events center. In June 2013, the Downtown Development Authority named the site: land along Woodward Avenue near the Cass Corridor.

  Christopher Ilitch unveiled renderings on the 20th of July 2014, naming the project The District Detroit. He said the goal was to "build out a sports and entertainment district that is world class and rivals anything in the country, perhaps the world." The plan called for five neighborhoods with European influenced apartments, a hotel, and new restaurants, complementing the QLine streetcar planned nearby. One neighborhood, which Ilitch nicknamed "Wildcat Corner," would fold in the areas around Comerica Park and Ford Field, replacing parking lots with new apartments and street level shops.

  Ilitch also promised the project would reshape Detroit's job market. He pointed to 1,000 new permanent jobs once the district was finished, and 8,300 more during construction. Olympia committed to filling 51 percent of construction jobs with Detroit residents, using two Michigan based contractors, and sourcing 80 percent of construction materials from Michigan companies when possible.

  Years later, the results were thin. Google moved a regional sales office from Birmingham onto the arena property in August 2018. A Little Caesars headquarters rose across from Comerica Park, and Wayne State University opened its Mike Ilitch School of Business next door, both tied to the Ilitch family. Beyond one additional office building, little else of the promised district had appeared.

• 4. The Cost Behind The Building

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  The arena was originally priced at $450 million to build, with another $200 million set aside for the district around it. Of that combined $650 million, $285 million was expected to come from public funds and $365.5 million from private investors. Separately, early reporting had estimated that public tax dollars would cover 58 percent of the arena's own cost, about $261 million. On the 24th of July 2013, the Michigan Strategic Fund approved the Downtown Development Authority's request for $650 million in funding.

  By the 23rd of May 2017, reports said the price had climbed well past that original estimate.

  In June 2017, Robert Davis and city clerk candidate D. Etta Wilcoxon filed a lawsuit over the funding. They sought to block the use of school property tax revenue for the arena and a new Pistons headquarters without a public vote. Voters had approved that money only for the Detroit Public Schools Community District's operating expenses. District Judge Mark A. Goldsmith dismissed most of the suit, ruling the plaintiffs lacked standing. He did let one unrelated claim proceed, an Equal Protection Clause allegation against the district on behalf of Davis.

  The Downtown Development Authority, which owns the arena, still uses an estimated $15 million a year in state school taxes to repay Michigan State.

• 5. Four Teams, One Roof

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  In late October 2016, reports surfaced that the Pistons were considering a move from The Palace of Auburn Hills to Little Caesars Arena, as soon as the 2017-18 season. Pistons owner Tom Gores and Palace Sports & Entertainment vice chairman Arn Tellem had been negotiating with Olympia Entertainment since the summer of 2015. Talks intensified as the Pistons opened their 2016-17 season, and included a possible merger between Olympia and the Pistons' parent company. The Pistons also wanted land nearby to build a new headquarters and practice facility.

  On the 22nd of November 2016, the Pistons confirmed the move would begin with the 2017-18 season. Detroit City Council approved it on the 20th of June 2017. The NBA Board of Governors made it unanimous and official on the 3rd of August.

  The move marked the first time since 1974 that all four Detroit teams played within the city limits regularly. It was the first time since 1978 that the Pistons themselves played a regular home schedule in Detroit, and the first time since 1961 that the Pistons and Red Wings shared one arena. Detroit became the only U.S. city with four major league franchises in a single downtown district. It was one of just two U.S. cities, alongside Philadelphia, where four teams share a single complex.

  That October, Olympia Entertainment and Palace Sports & Entertainment formed 313 Presents LLC, a joint venture handling entertainment bookings and event management across both companies' venues. The new company would soon shape what filled the calendar beyond hockey and basketball.

• 6. Opening Night, Empty Seats

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  Little Caesars Arena opened on the 5th of September 2017 with a ribbon cutting ceremony. The Red Wings played their first game there in the preseason, against the Boston Bruins on the 23rd of September, winning 5-1. Their first regular season game came on the 5th of October against the Minnesota Wild, a 4-2 win.

  The Pistons debuted at the arena in the preseason too, losing 108-106 to the Charlotte Hornets on the 4th of October. Their regular season home opener, also against the Hornets, came on the 18th of October, a 102-90 win. For that opener, the Pistons unveiled a new court featuring the Platinum Equity logo instead of the arena's own branding, making them the only NBA team with no arena signage on their floor.

  During the Red Wings' first regular season game, cameras caught a visibly half empty lower bowl on national television. Olympia CEO Tom Wilson explained that many fans were exploring the concourse instead of sitting down, just as they had at the arena's very first event. By early November 2017, the team said every home game to that point had technically sold out, despite the empty seats visible on screen. The Pistons faced the same criticism and gave the same answer: ticket sales were up, even if seats looked empty.

  The next year, in October 2018, the arena replaced all of its red seats with black ones, after media coverage pointed out that red seats made empty rows especially easy to spot.

• 7. A Name Nobody Asked For

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  On the 11th of February 2016, it was reported that a local businessman had sold the domain name littlecaesarsarena.com three weeks earlier, for what was described only as "five figures," to an international brokerage firm. The sale hinted that Little Caesars, the pizza chain also owned by the Ilitch family, had bought the arena's naming rights.

  Olympia Entertainment confirmed it that same year, on the 28th of April, announcing the venue would be called Little Caesars Arena. A large Little Caesars logo would sit on the roof instead, replacing an earlier plan for an LED roof display, which officials now dismissed as only a "placeholder." Chris Ilitch defended keeping the naming rights in the family, describing Little Caesars as a "legacy business" rather than something to sell to an outside company.

  The announcement landed poorly with fans. Before the official name was unveiled, some had told The Detroit News that the arena should instead honor Gordie Howe. After Howe died that June, an online petition began circulating asking that Little Caesars Arena be renamed for the former Red Wings player.

• 8. More Than Hockey And Basketball

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  The Great Lakes Invitational, a longstanding college hockey event, moved to Little Caesars Arena for the first time on the 1st and the 2nd of January 2018. The arena was booked to host the 2020 NCAA Men's Frozen Four, but the NCAA cancelled every championship that season on the 12th of March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Professional Women's Hockey League brought its Boston and Ottawa clubs to the arena on the 16th of March 2024, drawing a crowd of 13,736, the largest ever recorded for a professional women's hockey game in the United States at that point. A second PWHL game there a year later, between the Minnesota Frost and the New York Sirens, drew 14,288 fans. The tour's success led directly to the creation of PWHL Detroit.

  College basketball arrived at the arena on the 16th of December 2017, with a doubleheader pairing Michigan against Detroit Mercy and Michigan State against Oakland. The arena also hosted the Horizon League's men's and women's tournaments, branded Motor City Madness, through 2019, before both moved to Indianapolis. In 2018, it hosted first and second round NCAA Division I men's tournament games, Detroit's first taste of that tournament since the city held the 2009 Final Four at Ford Field. The tournament returned for the Midwest Regional in 2024.

  Little Caesars Arena hosted UFC 218 on the 2nd of December 2017, and the 2022 NCAA Division I Wrestling Championships. Professional wrestling arrived early too. WWE's Hell in a Cell pay per view played there on the 8th of October 2017, its first event in the building, followed by its first live Raw broadcast the following March. In August 2019, the arena hosted the League of Legends Championship Series Summer Finals, with an opening ceremony performance by Detroit musician Jax Anderson.

  Kid Rock played the arena's first concert on the 12th of September 2017. Paul McCartney, Guns N' Roses, Radiohead, Foo Fighters, Kendrick Lamar, Madonna, and Mary J. Blige have all performed there since. In June 2018, the arena was named Sports Facility of the Year at the Sports Business Awards. Its calendar already stretches years ahead, with the Big Ten women's basketball tournament booked for 2028.