The Golden State Warriors are far from making their move across the Bay back to San Francisco, but team president Rick Welts discussed some of the specs of the proposed new stadium, noting that it will likely be a lot smaller than their current home at Oracle Arena.
On the size of the new stadium:
"We haven't landed completely on the number of seats. It will not be as large from a capacity standpoint as the arena we play in now (19, 596). We think, frankly, that's a good design. We want it to be an extremely intimate facility. But until we do have the design nailed down, it's not possible to explain with accuracy the size of it."
On what the new stadium may look like:
"We don't really know what the economy is going to be in five years. We don't know what the economics of the NBA will be in five years; it's even premature to talk about pricing."
"What we do know is we want the arena to be full every night and for it to be full every night it has to be organized and priced in a way that 16,000, 17,000 are excited about coming. We're a long way toward getting to those discussions. It's really going to be as much about where the NBA economics go over the nest five-year period."
Whether the stadium will be done by 2017, as proposed:
"Anyone who is not familiar with our ownership group, I can understand the skepticism. But this is not only (co-owner) Peter Guber and (co-owner) Joe Lacob who are leading this. They paid the highest price ever paid for an NBA team to have the privilege of doing business in the Bay Area."
This project is still far from breaking ground, but the optimism and confidence in the project is second to none from this management group. Nevertheless, it's remains to be all talk, so we'll have to wait and see how this arena pans out.
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