There’s been plenty to cheer about in the Bay Area over the past few years. The San Francisco Giants have won three World Series in the past six seasons and last year the Golden State Warriors were undoubtedly the best team in the NBA and won their first championship since 1974-75. As those teams have made unforgettable runs through the playoffs, fans have been eager to jump on the opportunity to see those championships live, which has driven up prices on the secondary market.
Since TiqIQ started keeping track of secondary market data in 2010, five of the 10 most expensive World Series games have been played at AT&T Stadium. That is not just exclusive to baseball, as last year the Warriors had the most expensive secondary market NBA Finals tickets TiqIQ has tracked in that same time period.
That type of excitement and demand does not just appear. It is the result of hard work both on and off the field and court, which was the topic of discussion when Giants general manager Bobby Evans and Warriors president Rick Welts convened at Chat Sports’ historic “Minds Behind the Game: Championship Minds” panel on Monday night.
Chat Sports: Minds Behind the Game, a nationwide thought leadership summit founded in San Francisco, has featured Jed York, Joe Lacob, Charles Woodson, Tiki Barber, and Dan Gilbert at panels in the past. After the panel was expanded to New York for the first time in May, it returned to its San Francisco roots and this installment of Minds Behind the Game explored the philosophy behind the recent success of two Bay Area franchises.
Both Evans and Welts discussed what it takes to build and maintain a championship-caliber organization, and Welts said it started for the Warriors when they hired head coach Steve Kerr.
“We thought about how it play out in public, so let’s play this right: we hired a broadcaster who never coached a game before, who clearly changed the culture of a losing franchise, went to the playoffs two years in a row, and fire him. Then you’re going to go out and hire an announcer who had never coached a game before and expect a different outcome… Now, we’ve got a group of people who are all motivated by what the Giants achieved three times and what we achieved last year.”
As for Evans, he says the Giants have been successful for so long because they’ve built an expectation of greatness.
“The winning culture has become the expectation, and that’s a good expectation,” he explained. “Success is more sustainable if you build from within the organization, and that’s what we’ve done.”
Golden State’s plans for a new stadium in San Francisco also took center stage at the panel, with Welts offering up some new details.
“We are very confident that we will be able to bring the Warriors back to San Francisco, where the franchise originally moved from Philadelphia,” he said.
Just as important as a potential move itself, the arena won’t be funded with any public subsidy, a statement that drew a large applause from the crowd. Welts also said they won’t change their name from the Bay Area regional Golden State Warriors mantra to the more specific San Francisco Warriors.
As Evans and Welts can attest to, and was reinforced on stage at “Championship Minds Behind the Game,” no successful organization is built overnight and can’t be sustainable without great vision and leadership.