Steph Curry’s Reaction On Chase Center After First Look At Warriors’ New Arena

Stephen Curry and his teammates have moved to San Francisco, and they really like their new home. Curry played 10 years in Oakland, and he will start off the regular season at Chase Center.

“Today is where it became real,” Curry said Wednesday afternoon.

The $1 billion arena officially opened Tuesday. Curry practiced in downtown Oakland, and played home games at Oracle Arena. In his new home, Curry will have everything in one place.

“I think, for me, it’s different just because I’ve never had that experience,” Curry said. “I’ve seen other arenas — growing up in Charlotte, they had that — and that was kind of my first real experience with it, where you have one locker room, practice court, familiar setting no matter what day it is, and go over to the arena. So hopefully it will help expedite the overall comfort level of the transition.” 

Steph surprising 250 middle and high school girls to teach about financial and physical health ? pic.twitter.com/dQh9DukSVZ

— Warriors on NBCS (@NBCSWarriors) September 4, 2019

Rick Welts, President and Chief Operating Officer for the Golden State Warriors, says building the arena was a “perfect storm” of events. San Francisco doesn’t use public money to build sports stadiums, and the Warriors had to build the arena on their own expense.

“That’s just not the philosophy in San Francisco, so knowing we’re gonna build in San Francisco, we knew that would be the case,” he said.

“It’s very hard to do in San Francisco,” Welts added. “We’re a very small city. Seven miles by seven miles — there’s not a lot of 10 1/2-acre opportunities in San Francisco. We got very lucky to actually find this.”

Being in San Francisco opens a lot of new opportunities for the team and the front office.

“You have a city that’s really exploded on the global scene as one of the great cities of the world, driven a lot by what happens there from a business standpoint, which is part of why it’s so vibrant right now and so economically healthy right now,” Welts explained. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time like this in the Bay Area.”

The Warriors could afford the construction of Chase Center, and this move only adds to their power.

“Part of what we did — and I think you see it more and more with sports teams building arenas and stadiums — was we had to kinda fill that gap,” Welts said. “In our league, the ballpark has been around $300 million in taxpayer money to do these projects. So that’s a good part of the reason we created the office buildings, doing the hotel, doing all the retail, not only are they going to enhance the environment, but they’re going to help fill the gap of what would have been public financing for our budget.

“We have like a perfect storm. We have this roaring economy, we have the companies that are changing the world are part of our backyard, we have a championship-caliber team, and we have a great city, great global city that never in its history has had one of these

[arenas]

.”