Ramona Shelburne, ESPN Senior Writer Oct. 5, 2023, 11:47 a.m. ET
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- Senior Writer for ESPN.com
- Spent seven years at the Los Angeles Daily News
The Golden State Warriors have been one of the most successful NBA franchises over the past decade. They want to do the same in the WNBA, which announced Thursday morning that it has approved the organization as an expansion franchise beginning with the 2025 season.
“We come in here to win,” Warriors chairman Joe Lacob told ESPN. “Second, we want to see this league and women’s basketball grow, and we hope to be a big part of that.”
“We believe it is a game changer for us to come here and commit to this in a big way. We will bring all our resources to bear. We can make this machine work, and we will.”
The Warriors took first place in Forbes’ most recent NBA valuation with $7 billion, largely due to the enormous success of San Francisco’s Chase Center, a state-of-the-art, privately financed arena that opened in 2019, and corporate sponsorships is attributable.
Lacob said he intends to put the Warriors’ entire business structure behind the new WNBA franchise.
“I believe we will have the most revenue of any WNBA team,” he said. “And I think we can do very, very well as a company because we know how to do that. We have every opportunity and can provide the team and ultimately the league with sponsorship money that will help the league as a whole.”
The team will play its games at Chase Center and practice in Oakland, where the Warriors trained until 2019.
Therefore, Lacob said, the new franchise will likely be named “Golden State” to reflect a fan base throughout the Bay Area. However, internal discussions will continue over the next few months about whether the team will be called “The Warriors” or by another name, as well as uniforms and logos.
This is something of a full circle for the 67-year-old Lacob, who began his journey as a sports franchise owner in 1996 with the San Jose Lasers of the American Basketball League. He also held a minority stake in the league, which failed in 1998.
Lacob said he always regretted the failure of the ABL, which initially had better talent than the WNBA with 11 of the 12 players on the 1996 U.S. Olympic team.
“We rocked and played during basketball season, which I think is still the right way to do it,” he said. “We sold out and were doing really well. But we just didn’t get a TV contract. That was a blast. And personally, I can tell you, I lost over $10 million – which was a lot of money back then.”
The ABL also faced competition from the WNBA, which began play in 1997 and had the full force of the NBA behind its eight original franchises.
The league grew to 16 teams by the 2000 season, but over the next decade several franchises closed or relocated. The WNBA has been cautious about expansion since 2008, when the Atlanta Dream joined.
In recent years there have been renewed calls for expansion as the league’s popularity increased. The WNBA will continue to discuss adding a second expansion team, likely Portland, but league sources told ESPN those plans have not yet been finalized.
The Bay Area has long been considered a good choice for expansion because of its strong fan base for women’s basketball from Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as the Sacramento Monarchs, one of the original WNBA teams.
Lacob said he has been a long-time fan of the Stanford men’s and women’s basketball teams.
“Both my boys and girls played basketball,” Lacob said. “And I was very interested in Stanford basketball, both men’s and women’s. That was one of the reasons I did the ABL.” [and the Lasers].
“So this is a big turning point for me. The only reason it took all these years, like 25 years, is when I bought the Warriors.” [in 2010], we had to turn the team around. That was a few years. We then had a seven-year construction process for the arena, which was a huge investment of time and money. And then finally, just as I was ready to go, the pandemic hit. So the years go by and here we are now.