“For nine years I’ve been commuting,” adds Lacob, who lives in Atherton, a Silicon Valley enclave. “It’s been a brutal commute. It took me two hours today. I guess my point to you is, I do feel for those that feel it’s a sense of loss for the community, they have a sense of pride certainly for having this team. I understand that. I feel compassion for it. But life has to move on. And you know we built a new arena, which the great news is, BART really does generally go through the East Bay and connect into the city. And you can go right to the front door of this arena.”
Owners Rumors
The owners of the Golden State Warriors, still smarting from losing the NBA Finals last week, are asking a court to overturn a decision that would force them to pay $40 million to settle the team’s Oracle Arena debt. The franchise has filed a notice of appeal in a San Francisco court in its second attempt to reverse the ruling issued by an arbitrator last October, according to court documents.
The long-running dispute centers on the $140 million bond debt that Oakland and Alameda County took on to renovate the arena for the Warriors in the late 1990s. Warriors owners since then have followed the arena’s license agreement by paying $7.5 million per year to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority, the agency that runs the Coliseum complex. The remaining arena debt today is roughly $40 million, according to the authority.
Mark Berman: #Rockets owner @Tilman Fertitta on James Harden & Chris Paul: “These are 2 very competitive athletes & all they want to do is win a championship together for the Houston Rockets. We’re excited to have them back and we look forward to using this opportunity to try to be successful”
Chase Hughes: Leonsis waiting until after free agency to name a long-term team president means that interim pres. Tommy Sheppard will make the call on their RFAs on June 30. That means Tomas Satoransky, Thomas Bryant and Bobby Portis.
On Tuesday, Ted Leonsis released a statement to The Washington Post in which he shared the plan to take his time in forming the franchise’s new leadership team. Leonsis also denied reports that the Wizards pursued Toronto Raptors President Masai Ujiri, who constructed the roster that won the NBA championship last week. Tommy Sheppard, who has led the Wizards’ basketball operations on an interim basis for the past 11 weeks, will continue in the role through Thursday’s NBA draft and the start of free agency, which begins June 30.
“We have not commented on the many rumors surrounding potential candidates during this process, but I wanted to make an exception in this case out of respect to the Raptors organization as they celebrate their well-deserved championship,” Leonsis’s statement said. “Any reports that we have interest in Masai Ujiri as a candidate are simply not true, and we have never planned in any way to ask for permission to speak to him during our process.”
