Barber: Chase Center adds to Warriors’ 2019-20 weirdness

SAN FRANCISCO - The Warriors threw open Chase Center's finely detailed doors to the media Monday, encouraging awe-struck writers, broadcasters and photographers to behold the majesty of the team's new San Francisco arena - and to convey those splendors to a wider audience.

But one pocket of Chase Center was off limits to cameras: the home locker room. Apparently, some of the Warriors players haven't even seen it yet.

I don't think I am violating any nondisclosure agreements to report that the new Warriors locker room is remarkable. It is perfectly circular, the lockers arranged around the circumference of the room. Each locker sits atop wooden pull-out drawers and is bracketed by small closets in which the players can hang their clothes. Each has a personal TV monitor, so that we can know which golf tournament Stephen Curry is interested in that weekend. The ceiling is styled to resemble the ceiling at Oracle Arena.

When we trespassed Monday, the locker room was dark except for lights emanating from the individual lockers, from behind each carefully hung jersey. The clean, subdued sterility made it look like the set of a sci-fi movie, perhaps a Rollerball remake.

The scene made it clear just how much the Warriors have invested in this project, and their heightened sense of self at the start of the (next) San Francisco era. It also made clear how much the team has changed since we last saw it play a meaningful game.

Because it wasn't just the surroundings that jarred the senses. It was the names above the lockers. Willie Cauley-Stein. Omari Spellman. Glenn Robinson III. Eric Paschall. Juan Toscano-Anderson. It was a who-are-they moment, as well as a where-am-I moment.

Granted, some of those guys might not outlast the NBA preseason. But the basic fact is irrefutable. This Warriors team will be substantially different than the one that took shape in 2014.

It will play differently, with guys like Cauley-Stein and D'Angelo Russell being more suited to an isolation-style offense. It will have new sources of veteran wisdom, with Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston no longer around to school the kids. And the stat sheet will look different, too, with superstar Kevin Durant in Brooklyn and gunner Klay Thompson likely out until the All-Star break.

It's a brave new world, and sort of a scary one, for Warriors fans. Their team will be shaped and reinvented as the season progresses, as will many NBA teams in 2019-20. To be honest, we don't know whether the Warriors have a shot of making the NBA Finals this year. Or whether they are even a playoff team.

This new reality would have weirded us out a bit under any circumstances. But when the 2019-20 Warriors take the court for their first preseason game on Oct. 5, and for their regular-season opener on Oct. 24, the effect will be doubly disorienting. Because they'll be playing in an arena that is like nothing we've seen before in the Bay Area.

Chase Center already looks integrated into its surroundings. The outdoor walkways and approaches are welcoming. The views to the water are lovely from the east entrance on Terry Francois Boulevard, and even more impressive from the upper east concourses. You can see wharf industry and huge anchored ships - links to San Francisco's low-tech commercial past - and beyond them an expanse of bay that leads to the cranes of Oakland.

Inside Chase Center, art is everywhere. And there are so many mirrored bars, in so many clubs, I'm convinced that if you could cram every citizen of SF into the building, you could have all of them pasted in an hour.

But the heart of Chase Center did not feel special to me. It was cavernous and sterile, as colorful as the computer software and hardware that has helped finance it.

Oh, except for the main videoboard, hung over the court. Have you heard about the scoreboard? It's the biggest in the NBA, by far, with 9,699 square feet of displays all told, according to the Warriors. It floats above the court like a massive, brooding, idling vessel that you aren't sure is friend or enemy. I'm calling it the Hindenboard. Or maybe the LED zeppelin.

I'm told that from the highest seat in the arena, you can indeed see the entire court lying beneath the hulking board. But the clearance can't be much.

Of course, the interior arena will have a lot more life when it's filled with 18,000 fans. And it will be filled. Right? Well, almost certainly. But the Warriors have to be a little concerned about the timing of their westward move.

I'm not in the habit of feeling sorry for corporations or the billionaires who officiate them. But the coincidence of roster changes and venue change have thrust the Warriors into no man's land.

Either, by itself, would have been fine. If Durant had left and Thompson had torn his knee ligament and the Warriors had retooled in their absence, we could have made sense of the new product - in the lovable, musty, BART- accessible old confines of Oracle, which had become almost a second home to a lot of fans. If the Warriors had moved into that futuristic locker room with their full cast of characters, or something close to it, we could have made sense of that, too.

D'Angelo Russell putting up shots in a “The Bay” uniforms at Oracle Arena, or Livingston passing to Thompson on a fast break at Chase Center - either could have conformed to our picture of reality with a little practice. And either could have gone onto the ledger as a sure bet for Joe Lacob, Peter Guber and the other Warriors financiers.

Instead, it's a whole new ball of wax. Monday, team president Rick Welts reported that 70 percent of 2018-19 Warriors season-ticket holders had re-upped for Chase. I'd call that favorable. But it means that 30 percent of the crowd might be new fans, in a new arena, cheering for a lot of new players. That can't be what Lacob, Guber, Welts, coach Steve Kerr, then-San Francisco mayor Ed Lee, Chase CEO Thasunda Duckett and Kevin Durant (oops) envisioned on Jan. 17, 2017, when they stuck the business end of their golden shovels into the dirt of Mission Bay for a groundbreaking ceremony.

I don't know, maybe this will all go more smoothly than I imagine. It could also be pretty rough, with memories of Oracle championships so recently behind us. At least we know that whatever occurs at Chase Center this season, good or bad, we will get to see replays on a videoboard the size of a Costco.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@ pressdemocrat.com.