Lloyd Noble Center

The Lloyd Noble Center is an 11,562-seat multi-purpose arena located in Norman, Oklahoma, some 19 miles (31 km) south of downtown Oklahoma City. It opened in 1975 and is home to the University of Oklahoma men's and women's basketball teams. Before the construction of the facility, the teams played in the much smaller OU Field House, located on campus near Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. With the success of Sooner basketball in the 1970s and star forward Alvan Adams, demand became sufficient to upgrade to the modern and spacious Lloyd Noble Center, named after an alumnus and former member of the OU Board of Regents who gave OU's first ever $1 million gift to finance the center. The Sooners frequently sold out the arena during the Billy Tubbs era, with All-American forward Wayman Tisdale leading the high-scoring team to several Big Eight Conference titles and NCAA Tournament appearances. This led to the popular colloquialism around Norman that Lloyd Noble Center is "the house that Alvan built and Wayman filled." In January 2006, the NBA and the New Orleans Hornets decided to move two games from the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge to Oklahoma City due to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent low attendance it caused. The Ford Center in Oklahoma City was unavailable for one of the games against the Sacramento Kings, so it was moved to the Lloyd Noble Center. The center was named after Samuel Lloyd Noble (1896–1950), a Houston oilman and philanthropist, and founder of the Noble Corporation and the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation.