Phoenix Suns: 5 takeaways from a momentum-building win against the Raptors

2. The Home Court Advantage

This was the first time in the bubble the Phoenix Suns were considered the home team, where the only real advantage is to be in charge of the audio/video in the arena, and there are some kinks to work out.

I’ll give them points for creativity, but the virtual fan thing was just…weird. In case you missed it, the Suns had fans submit videos of themselves and displayed it on the large video board above the court as if they were actually sitting in the stands.

While a good idea in theory, it created an odd look and I’d much rather see Suns graphics and animation sprawled across the screen rather than random people awkwardly waving at the camera.

And by “Suns graphics” I don’t mean a static text reading “We are the Valley,” which is what was displayed when we weren’t looking at Joe from Glendale wearing green and smiling.

Then there were the on-court overlay graphics which were simply poorly done. The reason green screens work is because they are might and people in front of them aren’t wearing the same color green. However, when the green screen is simply a light brown basketball floor, it doesn’t work as well.

Due to every players’ and unifrom being a spectrum of brown, players looked transparent when they ran over the computer-generated graphics which over time became fairly distracting and frustrating.

The Suns’ creative department is better than that. Hopefully, we see some Mikal Bridges-like improvement from them in future home games.