The Warriors spent part of the offseason complaining that they weren’t getting respect for winning the NBA championship. The city of Oakland should start complaining, too.

The town’s reward for hosting a postcard-ready championship parade and supporting a ton of lousy Warriors teams over four decades? TNT will kick off its national telecast of the NBA season opener live from the place that best embodies the soul of the Warriors: Fisherman’s Wharf.

The TV people say there’s a perfectly good reason to set up camp within walking distance of 45 “I Survived Alcatraz” T-shirt stands. It is a better backdrop for TV. Plus, there’s room there for the planned pregame concert and daylong NBA-related festival.

“We felt that Golden State is the Bay Area team. Maybe people from Oakland will differentiate, but if you ask Golden State (the team), that’s how they feel,” Craig Barry, the executive vice president of production and chief content officer of Turner Sports, said Monday.

TNT looked at sites in Oakland but “at the end of the day, we felt like Fisherman’s Wharf Pier 43 was the best option.”

It’s not like the Warriors’ management dissuaded them. A Warriors spokesman said the TV network chose the site, but TNT producers explained their choice to Warriors representatives and they were fine with it.

Seeking S.F. cachet

Of course they were. The team’s owners are trying to build a $1 billion arena in San Francisco and on their own website dodge the question of whether they’ll drop “Golden State” from their name if they move across the bay. There is no financial reason for them to throw a few bones to the city they’re ditching, even if it did unreservedly support them through the painful Erick Dampier years. Anything that brands a Warriors-related experience as “San Francisco” better brands them as a San Francisco team.

And forget all the positive ink that Oakland has recently received amid its economic upswing. That means bubkes to out-of-town sports media.

For TV people, iconic visual images like the ones in San Francisco matter most.

“On the national level, when people think of Oakland, they don’t think yet of that iconic image of the Golden Gate Bridge or what have you,” said Antoine Lewis, a coordinating producer for ESPN’s “First Take” show.

But Lewis himself showed it can be done. During the NBA Finals last spring, “First Take” shot in Oakland along Lake Merritt. “We wanted to capture Oakland and all the energy there. It worked out great,” Lewis said. “We’ll be back. If the Warriors take care of their business, we’ll take care of ours.”

Surprisingly, Oakland has an unlikely champion in this latest public slight: Charles Barkley. The Hall of Fame player laments the fact that he and his fellow TNT pregame and postgame commentators will be marooned on the wharf.

‘Place was always loud’

“I’d rather go to Oakland than San Francisco,” Barkley said Monday. “They have a tremendous fan base. I’m disappointed that they’re going to leave Oakland. You want a rabid fan base. That place was always loud. Even when the team wasn’t no good, it was loud.”

“But these teams are making so much money, they’re never overly concerned about the fans,” Barkley said. “We’re becoming like the NFL. We just don’t give a s—. We just make money. We don’t care about the fans anymore.”

Chris Webber, a former NBA All-Star who will provide commentary on Tuesday’s opener, started and ended his career with the Warriors. He was a bit more temperate about the Oakland snub, saying “the Bay Area is not just defined by the lines of the Bay Area. The culture here is to be passionate about your team.”

Though the pregame show is a lost cause, some hope remains for Tuesday’s game telecast.

After hearing about how Oaklanders want their city to get the respect it deserves, TNT producer Barry said he is going to try to get a few more images of the city into cutaways before and after the commercials.

Anything but the wharf.

Joe Garofoli is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli