Team president Rick Welts of the Golden State Warriors greeted fans outside their new arena in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, introducing them to Chase Center. I’ve been saving up to sаy it for nearly seven years.

On Monday, Welts gave the media a tour of the arena (pictures included) little over six weeks before the first preseason game, which will pit Steph Curry and the Warriors against LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers on October 5.

However, it won’t be the Warriors who officially unveil the privately funded, state-of-the-art 18,000-seat sports and entertainment complex. The opening night event at Chase takes place on September 6, and it features the powerful Metallica alongside the San Francisco Symphony.

The number of concerts and other non-basketball events that will take place at Chase each year will greatly outnumber the number of Warriors games. Over the course of a year, the building that serves as the centerpiece of the 3.2-acre Thrive City mixed-use development will play host to 200 separate events.

There are 13 events scheduled for the first month, including a string of seven concerts in a span of nine days. Welts insists that the sound system at the Chase Center will be “awesome” for concerts, despite the fact that acoustics in sports arenas aren’t generally great.

However, the new arena’s sound system is unlikely to be the facility’s initial point of interest. It’s the gigantic scoreboard, rumored to be the largest in the NBA. More than 9,699 square feet of screen space makes up Samsung’s Chase scoreboard. Reportedly second in size, at 6,100 square feet, is the Golden 1 Center, home of the Sacramento Kings. Nearly 25 million pixels and 75 million LEDs can be found throughout the Chase Center. On Monday night, those lights were put to good use as the Warriors crushed the Lakers by a margin of more than 30 points.

However, the scoreboard is as large as a house and would make it difficult for thousands of concertgoers to see what’s happening onstage. The scoreboard can be retracted completely, which is a huge plus. When world-famous performers like Chance the Rapper, Eric Church, and Janet Jackson take the stage, they won’t be distracted by the scoreboard.

In addition to the scoreboard, there will be a 74-by-42-foot outdoor screen where fans who don’t plan on entering the arena may watch Warriors games. Among Thrive City’s other amenities, like parks, public plazas, business space, and art displays, this will be a major draw.

It has been announced by Wariors that the dining options available to Chase visitors would be much improved.

“There were a lot of things we liked about Oracle Arena,” Welts remarked. One of them was not being able to make delicious cuisine.

When compared to Oracle, which only has one kitchen, the Chase Center’s eight kitchens provide for more and better dining options. Chase will be home to restaurants like Oakland’s Bakesale Betty, San Francisco’s Tacolicious, Half Moon Bay’s Sam’s Chowder House, and many more that can only be found in the Bay Area. The Warriors claim there will be 23 bars available to athletes at the facility.

Despite this, the Chase Center’s seating capacity is only 18,000. This is significantly less than Oracle’s 19,500. The higher tiers of the arena are designed to make fans feel like they are still close to the action on the court.

“That’s by thoughtful design,” Welts explains.

After relocating from Philadelphia to the west coast in 1962, the Warriors finally made it back to the city of their birth with the opening of their new arena. In 2010, new owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber bought the franchise and made it known they wаnted to relocate it across the Bay from Oracle Arena in Oakland, where it had played for 47 years.