SAP Center
arena in San Jose, California, United States
SAP Center at San Jose (originally known as San Jose Arena) is a multi-purpose indoor arena located in San Jose, California. Its primary tenant is the San Jose Sharks of the National Hockey League, for which the arena has earned the nickname The Shark Tank.
History
Plans for a San Jose arena began in the mid-1980s, when a group of local citizens formed Fund Arena Now (FAN). The group contacted city officials and pursued potential sponsors and partners from the NHL and NBA. In the late 1980s, mayor Tom McEnery met with FAN, and subsequently a measure to allocate local taxes for arena construction came up for a public vote on June 7, 1988, passing by a narrow margin.
The arena was principally designed by Denver architect Charles Sink, a senior partner of Sink Combs Dethlefs.
In 1991, soon after construction began, the NHL granted an expansion franchise to San Jose. After it was discovered that the arena would not be suitable for NBA or NHL use as originally designed, the Sharks requested an upgrade to NHL standards, including the addition of luxury suites, a press box, and increased seating capacity.
In 1993, the arena was completed and initially named the "San Jose Arena".
For the 1996–97 NBA season, the arena served as home to the Golden State Warriors while their regular home court in Oakland (now known as Oakland Arena) was under renovation.
In 2001, naming rights were sold to Compaq, and it was renamed "Compaq Center at San Jose" (not to be confused with the Compaq Center (formerly The Summit) in Houston, Texas).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “SAP Center” as arena in San Jose, California, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q261863. Authority coordinates are 37.333, -121.901. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “SAP Center” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.