Wizards at Capital One Arena: What time do doors open?
Doors open about an hour before tip-off here.
Doors open about an hour before tip-off here.
Your leave-by time is the first travel row. Ready Time can alert you when it comes up. Put in your tip-off time, tap any duration, and the plan recomputes backward.
NBA game night at Capital One Arena, home of the Washington Wizards. For a concert here, start from the concert night plan instead: a support act sets the deadline rather than the anthem.
Get an alert on game night when it’s time to leave for Capital One Arena.
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You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
Start times here are the team's own. The NBA sells no national window, so a game goes on when the building and the market suit and there is nothing to convert from Eastern. These are the slots this team plays most often.
These are Capital One Arena’s own times. The team publishes start times with the schedule in the summer and a few move again for television during the season, so take the time on your ticket over the one you remember.
Cup group games, Christmas Day, the Martin Luther King Jr. Day afternoon and a nationally televised night run their own times. Type those in on the tip-off row.
The Metro goes to the door. Gallery Place/Chinatown is the arena’s own stop and it is on the Red, Green and Yellow lines, and Judiciary Square, Metro Center and Archives-Navy Memorial Penn Quarter are all walkable if your line does not reach it. A seven o’clock start lands in the evening commute whichever way you come, and the trains are the part of it that keeps moving.
The arena has a garage, but it publishes no rate and no way to book it, only a form that reaches its parking team, so the practical answer is the one the arena itself leads with: book a nearby garage ahead through SpotHero. The directions it publishes run from the three airports to downtown and then to signs for the arena, which is a polite way of saying the last mile is city streets. There is no dedicated rideshare zone, so a drop-off happens on the surrounding blocks.
Capital One Arena allows a wallet-size clutch and little else, apart from medical and parenting bags. Getting it wrong usually means walking back to the car and re-entering the line.
Check current sizes and door times on the official Capital One Arena FAQ before you go.
Doors open an hour before tip-off, which is what the arena states for its events generally rather than a basketball rule. Screening is a visual check and metal detection, so the queue moves at the speed of people emptying their pockets of keys, phones and cameras.
Bags are close to banned: a wallet-size clutch no bigger than 4 by 6 inches, and medical or parenting bags up to 14 by 14 by 6 which go in at the 6th and F Street entrance. No backpacks of any size, and there is no bag check, so a bag that fails has nowhere to go. Re-entry is the unusual part and it is allowed: once a Wizards game has begun you can leave and come back, through the F Street entrance only.
Capital One Arena was previously called MCI Center and later Verizon Center, so older directions and tickets may still use those names.
Doors, lots and bag rules change; the official site is the live source.
Doors open about an hour before tip-off here; that is when the crowd starts arriving, not when you have to. Being through the doors about half an hour before tip-off covers screening, the walk to your section, and a stop on the concourse.
Work backward from tip-off: minutes in your seat beforehand, walk to your section, security screening, walk from the lot, parking, then the drive (35 minutes in the default plan). That puts leave-by at 5:36 PM for a 7:00 PM tip-off. Change the tip-off time and every row moves.
It is whatever the team has scheduled, and these are local times rather than a converted national window. On this arena's clock: a weekend matinee tips off at 1:00 PM, an early-evening game at 6:00 PM, a night game at 7:00 PM. This example uses the night game window. Cup games, holiday afternoons and nationally televised nights run their own times; the tip-off row is editable for those.
The plan allows 10 minutes for a normal walk-through queue. It runs longer in the twenty minutes before tip-off. Arriving fifteen minutes off that peak is usually enough.
About an hour before tip-off here. Check the official Capital One Arena FAQ for your game.
Not in the lots here. If you are meeting people somewhere else, add that as a step and everything before it moves earlier.
Plan on a wallet-size clutch at most. Check the arena's own page for current sizes. The timing risk is being turned around at the door and walking back to the car: the walk twice and a second trip through the queue.
Flying in? The airport pages. Taking Amtrak? The station pages. No stadium listed? The tailgate timeline is the same plan without a particular lot.
Start the plan in the app, and the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island show the time left, with a bar that fills as each step passes.
Glance at it on the walk in without opening the app.
Every step also gets its own alert, and sharing the plan gives whoever is driving the same leave time, with alerts on their phone.
Live Activities are part of Premium, a one-time unlock.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
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