Inside Oracle Arena: The best homecourt advantage in the NBA

It’s Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals in Oakland. Stephen Curry had just scored eight points in one minute to expand the Golden State Warriors lead to 17. The Houston Rockets have since taken a timeout to sub in some defensive specialists in PJ Tucker and Luc Mbah a Moute. A futile attempt to stop the bleeding, and Curry smelled blood in the water.

With 4:10 left in the quarter, Curry slowed it down. He deliberately dribbled 35 feet away from the basket, sizing up his defender Eric Gordon. Klay Thompson set a screen to his right and James Harden switched onto Curry. They were locked in. Curry tried to jab left, Harden corralled him. The groundswell at Oracle Arena was palpable. Curry crossed over to his right then quickly behind his back to his left. That was enough. Curry pulled up and launched a 30 foot 3-pointer over his opponent. As the ball was in the air, Warriors fans let out an ahhhhh as if approaching the apex of a rollercoaster. Splash. Eruption. Shimmy. Pandemonium.

Harden missed his shot at the other end and Klay Thompson came back and made a bucket to put the Warriors up 19. That’s when Houston head coach Mike D’Antoni took a timeout with 4:34 remaining. According to Brett Yamaguchi, senior director of game experience for the Warriors, the dancers were supposed to come out then.

“The dance team performance got pushed back to the third quarter break.”

Oracle Arena is regarded as one of the best homecourt advantages in the NBA. There’s several theories as to why — from the arena’s construction to the attitude of the fanbase — but when the twenty thousand people in the building are cheering like they were after Steph hit the shimmy it’s too loud to hear yourself think. It is the musical score of the tidal wave that is the Warriors knockout punch. You can’t have one without the other no less than you can have Star Wars without John Williams. Just like “Imperial March” wasn’t crafted by singing in the shower, the Golden State crowd doesn’t impact the game by accident. It takes careful conducting from a staff of upwards of a hundred people to nudge those twenty thousand fans in the right direction, to get them to erupt at the right moment so that the tidal wave wipes out its enemy.

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For every game, Yamaguchi and his staff have a script of what every break will look like. The first timeout of the game might call for in-house DJ D-Sharp to spin some E-40 while the next one calls for a dance cam. The mid-quarter break of the second quarter might be reserved for an on-court promotion for one lucky fan to win a sedan. Halftime is Red Panda, and so on. It’s all carefully laid out and organized prior to the game. That can all change with a couple of splashes and a frenzied opponent.

“By the end of the night if you look at my copy [of the script], there’s scribbles and scratches and circles and arrows going to other different breaks,” Yamaguchi said.

After Curry made that 3-pointer and shimmied, fans cheered, reporters tweeted, coaches signaled to their players and vendors kept handing out beers. The game experience staff, however, began conducting.

“From there we went to a hot timeout,” Yamaguchi said. A hot timeout is when they scrap what’s on the script for that break in order to keep the crowd going. It’s sort of like a read option, where they’ll decide based on the feel of the game how to best incite the Oracle fans. It was the second timeout of the third quarter, and the script called for the dance team to perform a choreographed routine. However, that would have taken the focus off the on-court product.

Game experience wanted to keep the crowd’s attention on the ballooning lead. So Yamaguchi got on his headset and ordered the dance team be held until the next break. Instead of the performance, the camera men followed the celebrating players back to the Warriors bench. They showed highlights of the last few plays on the JumboTron, then panned to fans dancing and “having a good time.” All of it carefully orchestrated so that when the buzzer sounded again and both teams re-took the court, everyone at Oracle remembered where they left off. It all acts as a sort of bridge to maintain the momentum.

When the Warriors go on these bursts, opposing coaches will often call timeouts so their teams can catch a breath. According to ESPN’s Baxter Holmes, in 25 of the 27 games the Warriors have gone on a 15-0 run since 2014-15, their opponents used an average of 1.44 timeouts during those runs. The Warriors run continued after each of the opponent’s first timeouts. All of this to say that the timeout is an important chess piece for opposing coaches. What happens during those timeouts is important.

“With our team and the way we play and what we rely on with Steph, he seems to feed off the energy of the crowd,” Kerr said. “I thought you saw that tonight.”

Before the Warriors were selling out games and winning titles, they weren’t very good. Yet, the reputation for Oracle Arena, since it opened in 1966, as a great home atmosphere was still strong. In these days, when state-of-the-art arenas resemble space stations that would make Elon Musk blush, Oracle Arena is a throwback. Some believe the architecture amplifies the crowd.

In the center of the arena, the ceiling drops down low and gives off a more intimate atmosphere. Concrete beams hold up the building, giving sound waves more surface area to bounce off of. When in attendance, there’s definitely a different sonic quality to the crowd noise (and, no, crowd noise is not pumped in. “Never” Yamaguchi said.)

The elephant in the concrete room, however, is that Oracle Arena is due to shut its doors. By the end of 2019, the Warriors plan to move across the bay from Oakland to San Francisco to the still-under-construction Chase Center. With a new city comes new fans and, it stands to reason, a new homecourt atmosphere. The new arena will hold almost 1,500 fewer fans, and will be erected next to a million-dollar view of the water, not BART (the bay area’s public transit system) like Oracle. Where the Oracle Arena came to represent Oakland, the Chase Center is a metaphor for the Silicon Valley money that has taken over Northern California.

Tickets will be more expensive at the Chase Center, though an argument could be made that ticket prices would continue to rise as the Warriors keep winning. The Warriors won’t release expected prices but, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, could possibly be selling tickets for less than the market could command.

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Some fans — especially those who could afford season tickets and seat licenses in the first place — will take the trip across the bay. Many won’t be able to afford it. Still, the Warriors and their staff will make the migration. However challenging it is to conduct a crowd at Oracle, it will be even tougher to recreate that atmosphere in a new, more sterile home free of ghosts, history and OGs.

“Supporting a phenomenal group of basketball players is always kind of our mission,” Yamaguchi said. “And keeping momentum of the fans.”