Warriors blown out 108-91 in Oklahoma City showdown.
In the Bay Area, it’s the Warriors’ bosses who are at the head of the class
Hot off the presses, here are your latest power rankings of Bay Area sports-team owners.
But first, a few words about ownership. Or to use a term Draymond Green might prefer, proprietorship.
If your primary reason for buying a sports team is to turn a profit, you are an astute financial person and a heartless, soulless scoundrel.
Business is business, but let’s say you buy Ford. You can be ruthless and bottom-line, cheapen the product if doing so enhances the profits. Money will be won and lost, but no hearts broken. Even the most ardent Ford fan doesn’t wear a Ford jersey bearing the name of his/her favorite Ford employee. He doesn’t walk down the street yelling at passing cars, “Fooooooord! Whooo!”
If Ford suddenly puts out a sucky car or truck, Ford fans won’t be plunged into depression, they’ll simply buy a
Dodge, Chevy or Toyota.
But if you are a mega-bucks guy who buys, say, the San Francisco Giants, you become the steward of the hearts and souls of Giants fans. You inherit a moral obligation. If that means your annual profit suffers, you have to be OK with that, knowing you’ll never, ever
money over the long haul. So these power rankings reflect the committee’s perception of the heart-to-profit ratio of each team owner. (I am the committee.)
Warriors. The lurking dangers of the move to S.F. cloud the future. Less-fanatical fans? Traffic nightmares? Loss of mojo?
I am not a fan of the move because I believe it will dilute the Warriors’ success. But I’ve been wrong before, and if you’re deciding whether to bet on Joe Lacob, Peter Guber or me, I should remind you I once said it was a mistake to fire Mark Jackson. As Jack Del Rio would say, that one’s on me.
But that’s the past and the future. What about the now?
Good luck finding fault with Lacob’s machine. The loss of Jerry West aside — and maybe that couldn’t have been prevented — the W’s just don’t cheap out or make dumb mistakes. No other team in sports has more heart and intelligence at key leadership positions.
Lacob, Guber and their fellow investors have spruced up Oracle Arena even though they’re leaving it. They do the opposite of penny-pinching. Many owners would have let Andre Iguodala walk when he had one foot out the door. Lacob and Guber puffed out their cheeks and whipped out the credit card. And smiled.
Giants. Right now is a tipping point. Will the Giants’ owners, fronted by Larry Baer, take the big financial plunge needed to return the team to glory, or will they do just enough to keep the loyal fans sorta, kinda happy?
Giancarlo Stanton is hanging out there like a blimp-sized piñata. Will the Giants take a legit swing at him? Same with Shohei Ohtani, although that’s not a simple matter of highest bidder.
There’s still time to build a contender around Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner, but the clock is ticking.
Sharks. It’s hard to find fault with Los Tiburones owner Hasso Plattner. What do you want? Nice arena, and they’re in the playoffs every damn season, occasionally go deep. They’re really a San Jose treasure, doing what a good team does: give its home town pride and identity ... and wins.
Plattner seems to be a sportsman from the Larry Ellison mold (or maybe Ellison is from the Plattner mold), a fellow who burns to win, enjoys the competition and is willing to spend the dough.
49ers. Ownership here is also at a tipping point. Maybe Jed York has learned from youthful mistakes and matured into a solid team boss (for team owner Denise DeBartolo York). Maybe he has been studying the Joe Lacob playbook.
There’s no way to tell right now, because Jed’s missteps, including his palship with Trent Baalke, put the team in a big hole.
York gets credit for building a stadium, but it remains to be seen if Levi’s was worth the effort. We won’t know until the 49ers are good enough to entice fans to not only go to games, but also to actually sit in the seats.
Raiders. It appears from the outside that Mark Davis has checked out of Oakland and checked into Las Vegas. He’s like ZZ Top: “I’m shufflin’ through the Texas sand, but my head’s in Mississippi.”
Davis truly wants to win, baby, and it seemed for a while that he had broken the team’s decade-long slump in picking general managers and coaches, but that remains to be seen.
The big complaint, our committee says, is Davis’ dismissal of Oakland fans, who deserved more of an effort by him to keep the team in the Bay Area. Just as his dad did, Davis views the world as a hungry Raider Nation and his team as a movable feast. Oakland? Just passin’ through.
Davis declined to throw in with the 49ers at Levi’s, even when they could have been equal partners. It was a golden opportunity not only to keep the Raiders home where they belong, but also to embarrass the 49ers by out-drawing them.
A’s. The great thing about A’s owner John Fisher is that he provides a great cosmic balance to next-door neighbor Lacob. Yin and Yuck. (Technically, Yuck and Yin.)
If you buy the fairy tale that the A’s are currently building a team that will come to glorious maturity when its new ballpark opens, don’t forget to leave cookies for Santa.
If that really is the A’s plan, building for the ballpark’s opening, they should be signing 12-year-olds. In reality, the organization is just treading water until Fisher sells the team and taps out with a massive profit after years of running the A’s — and their fans — into the ground.