It’s been over four years since Disney and the NBA announced the new NBA Experience attraction would be coming to Disney Springs, and today marks the grand opening of this attraction. So, the question on everyone’s minds is, is this replacement to DisneyQuest a slam dunk? For a select few, the answer is probably yes.
I’m not a sports fan, so I am probably not in Disney’s target demographic for this experience. However, that is probably true of a lot of the folks strolling through Disney Springs’s West Side. If you don’t have any interest in basketball or physical exertion, this is definitely not the experience for you. If you do happen to have either of those interests, you will definitely find something you enjoy here, but where your satisfaction level lands relative to the ticket price will be directly proportional to the severity of those interests. Speaking of ticket prices, the damage comes in at $34 and $29 for adults and kids, respectively, which is not a cheap day out for the family, but isn’t the most painful price tag to find at Walt Disney World. We’re still waiting to see whether admission will be included in Disney’s higher-end ticket products (specifically the Disney Platinum Plus Annual Pass or Disney’s Water Park Fun & More ticket upgrade), but for those who want a taste of the NBA without the sticker price, you can also check out the NBA Experience store located adjacent to the attraction.
Starting at the entrance, you’ll kick off the fun with an exciting legal waiver, and then you move to a set of kiosks where you’ll create a virtual persona that will be used at each of the activities. You then enter the main lobby via the “Player Entry Tunnel” and find yourself in a well-executed recreation of an NBA center court, complete with Jumbotron. The Experience is spread across two levels (DisneyQuest was five stories, so math majors may postulate it is at maximum only 40% as fun), and like DQ there are different experience zones (13 in total) spread across the two floors.
On the first floor you’ll find most of the non-sweaty offerings to help you get into the NBA mood. In one corner there are two small movie screening rooms, with each film running about 10 minutes. One is said to immerse you in the thrilling sights and sounds of an NBA game, and the other is a more “emotional film” (“emotional film” was definitely a heavily used phrase during the Cast Member training, as it was used by at least four different people to describe the movie offerings). There’s another section made to be a recreation of a locker room with screens that allow you to look through each NBA/WNBA team’s players and their stats. The Champions section also uses interactive screens to let you look back through the history of the NBA/WNBA championships, reviewing stats, highlight footage and fun facts about the games. The most interesting area on the lower level, and what is likely to be the “coolest” and most popular experience overall, is the Combine. Here each member of your party can be analyzed by the computer to determine their draft worthiness, with it measuring your “wingspan” (distance from fingertip to fingertip), your vertical reach, your vertical jump, your shooting accuracy and the arc of your shots. It was fun both to be analyzed and to watch others in your party do tricks at the computer’s command, and there’s the unadvertised benefit of getting to see an automatic basketball return, which is kind of like a bowling ball return except it shoots the ball at your head…gently.
If the first floor is about information, the second floor is about interaction, as pretty much everything here is active. There’s so many activities that it’s easy to miss some of the ones tucked into corners, and almost every one involves having a basketball in hand. For gamers, there is an arcade section that offers NBA console gaming along with banks of the “pop shot”-style basketball arcade game that nearly everyone has played at some point, and even a few kid-sized versions for the littler ones. Taking the gaming theme to the next level, is the Slingshot activity, where you shoot foam basketballs into baskets at varying heights using…you guessed it…slingshots. It’s definitely a very unique and fun experience, but if you’re looking to score a bunch of baskets, don’t get your hopes up…it’s tough! On the more traditional side is the Dribble activity, in which you’re assigned to a pod for a dribbling lesson while the system rates your form.
The two most unique “active” experiences on the upper level are exclamatively named Shoot! and Dunk! In the Shoot! experience, which is the only area of the building to have a full size basketball court, a Cast Member will act as your rebounder and guide you to various points on the court to take shots from as a virtual crowd cheers behind you. It’s fast-paced and really fun, even though only those who are practiced basketball-ers are likely to make any of the shots. Dunk! offers another unique experience you’ll be hard-pressed to find elsewhere, in which there are user-controlled hoops that can be height-adjusted via a touchscreen panel. You are in complete control of the experience, so you can adjust the hoop height to as low as 7’ and perfect your dunking technique, or maybe you’ll choose to spend your allotted time incrementally raising the height to see how high of a dunk you can handle (I topped out quite a ways below regulation height, so my basketball career will likely remain sidelined).
Once you’re ready to cool off, there are a few more passive options to check out as well. These options contained one of the experiences I found really interesting named Replay. Here you are told that you have been stationed in the NBA replay center in New Jersey and are tasked with reviewing challenged on-court calls to either confirm or reject the ref’s decision. You’re shown a clip and then given a bank of monitors where you can call up the same shot from multiple angles, and you have thirty seconds to lock in your decision. Beyond Replay, there is the standard-fare trivia, where you can compete against others to test your NBA/WNBA knowledge and recall speed. There is also a draft experience, which was not working during my visit. It’s said to let you “experience the incredible moment” of being drafted into the league, but based on what you can see, it looks like a computer-controlled photo opportunity with a very creepy looking Madame Tousseau-style figure of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver.
So overall, is the NBA Experience worth it? If you’re not totally against physical activity or a sport that celebrates it, you’ll probably find at least a couple of hours of entertainment here. Whether that is sufficient to justify the price tag, however, depends on your personal calculus. If you’re a die hard basketball fan, you could probably spend half a day here easily and love every minute of it. For those who watched DisneyQuest debut to amazing promise only to watch it wither and become sadly outdated over its twenty-year run, the good news here is that technology takes a back seat to the interaction, creating a more timeless experience that should age gracefully. Will we be glad to see this location stick around for two decades as its predecessor did? Only time, and the ticket sales, will tell.
