WNBA, Warriors ‘close’ to agreement for SF expansion team

At long last, it seems like the Bay Area will get a WNBA team.

The Athletic’s Marcus Thompson reported Tuesday night that the Golden State Warriors “are close” to bringing a WNBA franchise to the Bay Area. A statement from the Warriors given to the San Francisco Chronicle said it is “premature” to say a deal was finalized, but both the Warriors and the WNBA acknowledged conversations have been ongoing. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.) Initial reporting from The Athletic said the team would be “based in Oakland” out of the Warriors’ old practice facility, which the team still owns, before playing all games at Chase Center in San Francisco.

Many have assumed the Warriors were always going to get a team, particularly given Warriors owner Joe Lacob’s past public declarations of interest and his history in women’s basketball. Lacob was the owner of the San Jose Lasers of the American Basketball League, a professional women’s league that existed from 1996 to 1998. The WNBA was founded in 1997 and effectively helped end the ABL.

But the Warriors weren’t the only bidder interested in the Bay Area. The African American Sports & Entertainment Group (AASEG) first expressed its intent to bid for a WNBA expansion team to play in Oakland two years ago.

Since then, AASEG has partnered with former WNBA star Alana Beard and Everest Talent Management, a marketing agency, and acquired an exclusive negotiating agreement with the city of Oakland to secure half of the Oakland Coliseum complex.

With a Black woman in Beard as the point person, AASEG has not been shy about the potential value of its bid to the WNBA, which sees Black women make up more than 70% of the players in its league.

“I’ve kind of felt like this is sort of tailor-made for Oakland,” AASEG founder and president Ray Bobbitt said to Bay Area News Group last year. “Just because the Warriors were in Oakland and then they left Oakland, and then we brought this to the table first. We know that they’ve had an opportunity over the years to do this, but they haven’t.

“When you look at our proposal in its totality and kind of what we did in the way of bringing attention here and making sure we engage the league, it would be hard to see how somebody would not want to just root for this.”

AASEG has not put out any public statement on the report, but a source confirmed to SFGATE that the group still intends to submit a bid to the WNBA for an expansion team to come to Oakland.

If it does, it will force the WNBA into making a direct decision — on San Francisco versus Oakland, and on a Warriors ownership group led by Lacob and made up of mostly white men versus an ownership group led by Black women.