When reached for comment by The FADER, Welts was not made available. But Welts has repeatedly made his case publicly, most recently in an interview on Bay Area sports reporter Tim Kawakami's podcast. He praised the proposed Chase arena’s sight lines and the angles of its seats; he promised it would be constructed to hopefully replicate the unique and ballyhooed fan experience inside Oracle. And he said, “What makes Oracle so special? It’s not the four walls that we play in. It’s the people that are there.”

So why move? Because Oracle was built in the ’60s and renovated in 1996; for modern pro sports’ teams bottom lines, that means its builders may have well been speaking Aramaic. You move to a shiny new arena in SF, and, as the plan goes, you become the playpen of tech millionaires the city over.

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You can’t begrudge the team for that, not completely: the Warriors are a business, and it is the responsibility of its employees to maximize its profits. It’s something this ownership group’s administration has done remarkably well. Lacob and Guber purchased the team in 2010 for $450 million; according to Forbes, it's now valued at $1.9 billion.

But what’s missing in that particular conversation about the logic behind a new arena is any bit of the, well, vibes. Welts himself uses the word “special.” But a ruthlessly profitable business isn’t special. It’s the profoundly illogical love that a local has for its sports team that is special.

In a thorough piece on the battle for the Warriors in SB Nation, the writer Grant Brisbee jots off all manners of compelling stats. A couple of the most pertinent:

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First: “The Warriors aren't moving away, remember. They're moving back. The San Francisco Warriors played just south of the city for 10 seasons, and people gave exactly zero shits. The team had at least one of Wilt Chamberlain … and Rick Barry”—two stone-cold legends—“in every season, often two of those players, but they still never drew well.”

Second: “Six years ago, the Warriors were in the top-10 in attendance during a season when Kelenna Azubuike”—a name now lost to the waste paper basket of hoops history—“led the team in minutes played.”

In 2012, the national sportswriter Bill Simmons (full disclosure: my former boss at Grantland) wrote about the Warrior’s four decades of on-and-off ineptitude right before their recent sublime resurgence.

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Rattling off their nearly unbroken string of screwups, Simmons also made it clear that this was a fascinatingly colorful team. I mean: “During the [NBA’s] Cocaine Era (1977-1986), the Warriors somehow ended up with three of the league’s most notorious coke guys ([Bernard] King, [Michael Ray] Richardson and [John] Lucas) and an interesting stigma: As legend had it, the Oakland Hyatt (where visiting teams stayed) was the best place in the league to score drugs, so struggling players routinely fell off the wagon during their Golden State trip.”

But what he harped on was their fans: their greatest calling card was still “everyone realizing/remembering that the Warriors’ home crowd trumps just about everyone when it actually has something to root for.”

That “something to root for” vibe was last seen, before the Steph Curry era, in 2007, when Baron Davis led the 8th-seeded Warriors to a first-round playoff upset of the 1st-seeded Dallas Mavericks. Late in that same playoff run, in an ultimately futile second-round matchup against the Jazz, Davis would momentarily suck the very soul out of a gangly Muscovite.