What is K O’Donnell’s Sports Bar & Grill?
The Scottsdale Airpark is square miles of office parks and hangars, and after work it drinks at one place. K O’Donnell’s Sports Bar & Grill, which everybody shortens to KO’s, has sat at 14850 N Northsight Boulevard, on the corner of Raintree Drive and Northsight just west of the 101, since 2005.
It is a family bar in the literal sense. Kevin O’Donnell, whom the bar’s own history describes as a legendary poker player, opened it; in 2013 he sold it to his daughter Jennifer, who rebuilt the food menu around fresh ingredients and rewrote the drink and beer lists. Regulars call it Scottsdale’s neighborhood Cheers, and the bar has adopted the line.
What it is physically: a big room and a bigger patio with more than 70 TVs inside and out, every sports package, an outdoor game area, and a stated promise of not one bad seat in the house. The patio is dog-friendly and has won awards; the grilled wings have won AZCentral’s Best Wings in 2024 and 2025, the same years the paper named KO’s the Valley’s Best Sports Bar. Arizona Foothills has handed it Best Place to Catch the Game five times since 2020, and “Check, Please! Arizona” filmed here in 2025.
Our verdict: this is the best pure sports bar in Scottsdale north of Shea, the kind of room Old Town imitates with neon and bottle service, run by a family that lives on the tips.
Game days, the late-night menu and the OTB window
Use the weekend mornings. KO’s opens at 9 a.m. Saturday and Sunday, which puts the 9 a.m. Arizona kickoffs for East Coast college games and the early NFL window on 70 screens before the Airpark has finished its coffee. Weekdays it opens at 11; Monday and Tuesday it closes at 10 p.m., Wednesday at midnight, and Thursday through Saturday at 1 a.m.
Happy hour and the late shift. The main happy hour is Monday through Friday, 2 to 6 p.m., dine-in only, with the games on and the taps open. The move most people miss is the late-night menu, which starts at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday with its own food and drink specials; in a neighborhood where most kitchens close at nine, that makes KO’s the Airpark’s answer to late-night food. There are daily specials on top of both.
What to order. The grilled wings, which are the house signature and the award winner. Everything else is sports-bar food that Jennifer O’Donnell rebuilt after 2013, and the beer lineup is broad for a neighborhood room. Prices sit at the honest end of Scottsdale.
The calendar. Wednesday is Front Row Live team trivia. Live music hits the patio on select weekends. Since 2016 KO’s has run daily off-track betting, one of the few bars in the city that does, which makes Derby day its own event here. Spring training afternoons bring the Airpark’s visiting-team fans, and WM Phoenix Open week, with TPC Scottsdale a few minutes north, fills the patio for the whole tournament. The charity calendar is steady: Mutts & Mimosas for Lucky Dog Rescue, an annual Ugly Sweater party, care packages through the Arizona Clemson Club.
Logistics. Free lot parking in an office park, which means easy on weekends and tight at a weekday lunch. Rideshare from the Kierland and Quarter hotels is about ten minutes. For the rest of the city’s screens, see our happy hour guide.
A poker player’s bar in the office park
The Airpark of 2005 was already one of the biggest job centers in Arizona, and it had almost no nightlife; the office crowd drove to Kierland or down to Shea. Kevin O’Donnell’s bet was that a big, bright sports bar at Raintree and Northsight could keep them. The poker-player legend is part of the bar’s own telling, so we repeat it as such.
The handoff is the more interesting chapter. When O’Donnell sold to Jennifer in 2013, the bar could have coasted on screens. Instead she went after the food, and the awards followed in order: Arizona Foothills’ Best Happy Hour in 2019 and nearly every year since, Nextdoor’s Neighborhood Favorite four times, the Foothills’ Best Place to Catch the Game in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024 and 2025, and finally AZCentral’s Best Sports Bar in 2024 and again in 2025. The 2016 addition of daily off-track betting, rare in Scottsdale, gave it a second identity as a horseplayers’ room on big race days. A grand re-opening along the way came with a 50/50 raffle for Save The Family, which tells you how the place thinks of itself.
Where it sits in the city’s bar history is as the model for the suburban sports bar that the 2010s and 2020s tried to industrialize. The Airpark corridor has since added chain lodges and a sportsbook at TPC Scottsdale, and Zipps closed its Frank Lloyd Wright room in June 2026; KO’s has outlasted or out-rated all of them with a family name on the door. The older local lineage runs through Goldie’s on Via Linda and the original Zipps on Hayden, and KO’s is their northern cousin.
Honest assessment: it is loud, it is big, and on a Cardinals Sunday it is a wall of jerseys. Those are the job. We put it on our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale as the one sports bar north of Shea you should drive to on purpose.