When the Warriors play at Chase Center in front of a sold-out crowd, it’s a force to be reckoned with.
But is it a force stronger than Bay Area rush hour traffic?
We’ll find out soon enough, because in an affront to good sense and good basketball, the NBA scheduled Game 6 of the Warriors’ first-round playoff series to tip off at 5 p.m. Pacific on Friday.
Yes, it’s a working day, but the sun will be up when the game starts, and it will still be up when the game ends.
Who thought this was a good idea?
A quirky weekend start time at Chase Center is understandable — 12:30, 3:30, 5:30, whatever thirty, people will show up on the weekend.
But this? It’s going to be a challenge.
If you didn’t already know, the NBA is, first and foremost, a TV show, and when the Warriors make an appearance, the ratings go through the roof.
That’s genuinely what this absurd game time is about: the NBA (justly) assumed an East Coast audience would rather watch Warriors-Kings than Lakers-Grizzlies.
But it’s hard to see this as a positive for the Warriors. Folks in Memphis need to pound (even more) energy drinks to stay awake for a 9 p.m. Central game, all while LeBron James keeps his regular game-day routine. Meanwhile, the Warriors will be disadvantaged because they’re popular.
And it’s pretty clear that no one considered the Warriors’ (or Kings’) nap schedules when they made this schedule.
Now, the Warriors — champions they are — will surely overlook this disadvantage, but I imagine it will be there at tip-off, unlike a good chunk of fans.
The worst part of it all is that the Dubs will need that home crowd on Friday. There was just a bit too much back-patting by the Warriors after their Game 5, but the job isn’t done. Lose Friday, and then the Warriors get a Game 7 in Sacramento on Sunday.
Seeing as it took six months for the Warriors to beat a playoff-caliber team on the road this season, I’m skeptical they can do it in back-to-back games.
And yet a letdown in Game 6 seems inevitable for the Dubs.
A robust and in-voice Chase Center could push them through that.
I don’t know what a bunch of folks scrambling into the building at 5:15 will do for the overall atmosphere. I’m not excited to find out.
Golden State has been asked to play countless 6 p.m. weeknight games over the years — not just in the NBA Finals but also in the Western Conference Playoffs. And while Warriors fans always pack the building — no matter which side of the Bay — things have consistently looked hairy until the last possible second.
What happens an hour earlier?
Between getting to the arena, getting into the arena, and taking out another mortgage to buy a beer, it’s not easy to go to a game these days.
It’s even more challenging if you have to take off work to make the first quarter.
Does the NBA think that all Warriors fans are the kind of folks who make their own work schedules? Do the league honchos in New York and ESPN executives in Connecticut think that the Google bunkers at Chase Center are actually Google offices?
“Just got done writing that code. I’m going to pop my head out — I hear the Dubs are on a run.”
No, most people in the stands are die-hard fans who scraped together a lot of money at their classic 9-to-5 to see their favorite team. While the elite radio stylings of Tim Roye and Tom Tolbert are a gift to Warriors fans, I doubt it’ll feel that way when you paid hundreds for a ticket but are stuck listening to the game because no one thought putting two stadiums a few blocks apart in the middle of a congested city might have some adverse side effects.
Let’s be clear: I’m the person least inconvenienced by this. I trade my six-month-old’s nighttime routine for Steph Curry’s pregame routine on Warriors game days.
(That six-month-old — up at 6 a.m. every day, bless her — is responsible for my reprehensible yawn after Game 1 of this series. “You’re yawning after a game like that?” Steve Kerr quipped. I was too tired — it was nearly 10 p.m. — to come up with anything funny to say in return. So yeah, the earlier, the better for me.)
But I’m not a paying customer.
It seems those don’t matter to the NBA much anymore, so long as the people flipping through the channels at home are happy.
The last time the Warriors played at 5 p.m. on a weeknight was 2008 — so long ago that I needed to use multiple newspapers to verify the time A newspaper! Can you imagine?
That late-afternoon game just so happened to be the first night of “We Believe” — a showdown with the Denver Nuggets at Oracle Arena that looks quaint by the team’s more recent standards.
That Warriors team had no weight or sway with the league. They were just happy to be on national television.
Times have changed.
Or have they?
Bust out those We Believe shirts again, because if the coach of that Warriors team — Don Nelson — wants to watch the Warriors on Friday in Maui, he’ll have to turn on his TV at 2 p.m.
Will he even have a joint ready for the game?