The Golden State Warriors, pressing their advantages to the maximum as is their financial wont, have submitted a bid to host an NBA All-Star Game no sooner than 2021.
This is much is known, though. While Michael Jordan is likely to be there, neither Chris Cohan nor his son are likely to join to reprise their special moment from the 2000 game in which Cohan was presenting an award to Jordan at the game, brought his son with him to the floor, and still got booed by the crowd as though he had set fire to Santa Claus in front of Mother Teresa on national TV.
Chris was, you see, not very popular.
But the Warriors' bid, which will no doubt be approved once the kinks of the new building are sorted out, also flies in the face of Joe Lacob's old pal Vivek Ranadive, who already has a new building in Sacramento and would like to have his own All-Star Game.
The most noteworthy problem in Sacramento, of course, is that there aren't enough hotel rooms to satisfy the demand, and the B&B business isn't so thriving that it can cover the overflow.
But it is also Sacramento, one of the league's typically more forlorn franchises, and the team hasn't hosted a game since 1966 – three cities and four buildings ago, when Sacramento was Cincinnati and Golden 1 was the Cincinnati Gardens.
In short, while the Warriors would just be piling on its massive marketing and attraction advantages, Sacramento probably needs the game more. It would at least give Ranadive one less to envy the team he tried to run but couldn't and has tried to chase but can't.
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And somehow, given Lacob's relationship with Ranadive and vice versa, a joint venture seems out of the question.
Thus, knowing that this is clearly a wrong-side-of-history argument, I'd prefer (to the extent that I care) that Sacramento get something sooner than Golden State, if only so the league will at least acknowledge that the franchise exists beyond David Stern preventing it from being moved to Seattle.
And if Adam Silver has to sleep at City Hall in a pup tent next to Jerry Brown because he can't get into the Hyatt Regency, well, I can live with that.
