Funny. But I've LIVED in Venice, and will be there again in a couple of weeks. And trust me, it looks nothing like Oakland.
Bad ownership which picked bad GMs which picked bad coaches. They also had some lousy drafts, due to bad GM.
Oakland is not a big market. The Oakland A's are not a big market baseball team either. California does not automatically equal big market team.
Agreed. In my youth they were the San Francisco Warriors... but their uniforms which were truly unique for the era were emblazoned with "The City." They have gotten so far from that, but even then they were a distant second fiddle to the Lakers with Wilt and Baylor and West.
The Bay Area has over 7 million people. That makes them bigger than Houston, Dallas-Ft Worth, Miami, Philly, etc. The only cities that have larger populations that could credibly call a franchise their home team is NY, LA, and Chicago. Maybe you're not familiar with the geography or something, but you have Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, and billion little towns all abutting one another there. And, unlike in baseball, there is only one basketball team.
Golden State is a weird case because even when they had a franchise player (Chris Webber), they were still incredibly unpopular as a destination. Then Webber complained his way out. San Francisco/Oakland doesn't fit the NBA player demographic that well. It's a big place, but they don't have the media coverage of LA or NY. They don't have the party scene of Miami. They don't have the African-American culture of places like Atlanta, Houston, or DC. Their best comparison is Boston, which has only been popular lately because they've had a good team and good management. In their crappy years in the late 90's-early 00's, nobody wanted to go there. Houston already has good management and our city has its plusses, which unfortunately will never be LA or NY. But we could be as popular as place as pretty much any other city if we got a franchise player.
Rich mans' LA Clippers. Location is nice, but bad management and team product negates the good location. Then on the city itself - San Fran might not be as as "integrated ethnically" from what little I've heard and from what little I've actually been to SF. Neither is Newport Beach in Socal where Kobe had a home, though like with other big cities its an outlying area to the big city that well-to-do can call home.
