On Jan. 13, 2023, the San Antonio Spurs turned a regular-season home date into a stadium-scale event, hosting the Golden State Warriors at the Alamodome and announcing an official crowd of 68,323, the largest attendance ever for an NBA regular-season game.
The basketball was almost a footnote next to the spectacle. Golden State won 144–113, a lopsided score line that couldn’t touch the electricity of the setting: NBA hoops staged in a cavernous dome, with upper decks packed the way they usually are for football and Final Fours. And for the Spurs, the point wasn’t just to chase a number, it was to celebrate a milestone. The franchise used the Alamodome, its former home, as the centerpiece of a 50th anniversary season celebration that had been years in the planning.
If the record felt inevitable once the game was announced, that’s because the Spurs understood the formula. You don’t break an attendance mark like this by accident. You need a stadium-type building, a motivated market, and a reason that extends beyond “we have a game tonight.” San Antonio had all three. The Alamodome isn’t just bigger than an NBA arena, it’s a memory palace for the city’s basketball identity, the place the Spurs played before the AT&T Center era. Bring fans back there, add a marquee opponent, wrap it in anniversary emotion, and suddenly a January night starts feeling like a civic reunion.
The previous NBA single-game attendance record had stood for a quarter-century, which tells you how rare these opportunities are. That old mark was 62,046, set on March 27, 1998, when the Atlanta Hawks hosted Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls at the Georgia Dome. The Georgia Dome game had a perfect storm of its own: Jordan, the late-’90s Bulls aura, and the looming sense that the league was watching the end of an era in real time.
That’s why the 1998 figure lasted so long. Most NBA teams simply don’t play in venues large enough to challenge it, and when they do, it usually requires a deliberate “event game” decision, sacrificing sightlines, altering the feel of the building, and betting that the novelty will translate into ticket demand. San Antonio made that bet, and it cashed.
Record. Breaking. Atmosphere.
The official attendance tonight for Spurs-Warriors in the Alamodome is 68,323 😱 pic.twitter.com/hjQl75f6Dv
— NBA (@NBA) January 14, 2023
People starting to fill the Alamodome…
This @warriors be @spurs game is going to be so sick… can’t wait to see how loud it’s going to get with 65,000 fans… plus the all 90s hip-hop warmup too 🔥 #BackHomeInTheDome #GoSpursGo #50thAnniversarySeason pic.twitter.com/J1nqcfDLzF— Matt Bonner (@mattbonner_15) January 13, 2023
