Rarely has early preparation for something been viewed as strange or puzzling. The move made by Oakland city officials will be the exception to that.
The Golden State Warriors are in midst of a playoff run that has seen them make it into the Western Conference Semifinals in a match up against the Memphis Grizzlies. This team has been playing great basketball for a majority of the regular season and now into the postseason.
Featuring the NBA MVP in Stephen Curry, Coach of the Year in Steve Kerr, and a surrounding cast that has one all star section after another, this team has a legitimate shot at winning the franchise’s first NBA title since 1975.
City officials, it seems, have gotten swept up in the success and excitement this warriors team has brought to the city of Oakland and have taken one giant step forward on all this. SFGate.com reports that they have started to plan a championship parade for these Warriors in the city (via Matt Moore, CBS Sports):
Her latest challenge is to figure out what happens if the Warriors win the NBA title. Do they start the parade in Oakland and wind up in San Francisco? Does Oakland get shut out of a parade all together? Does San Francisco allow Oakland to have their parade as recognition for the team’s 44 years in the East Bay?According to a source, Schaaf has already talked to San Francisco mayor Ed Lee about what a parade would look like. One idea might be to begin the march in Oakland and then put the team on a barge to San Francisco.
I am all for being prepared and having a solid and detailed plan of an event that is going to be put on sometime in the future, but this is far from a guarantee to even see the light of day. The Warriors are in a battle with Memphis right now to even get out of this second round right now. There is so much more basketball Golden State has to get to and succeed in before this parade plan can have any legitimacy to it.
The NBA Finals do not start for another month and the road to those finals is one full of difficulty for the Warriors who are a great team no question, but not one that is above being defeated as we saw last night in Game 2 of their series with the Grizzlies. I think it is was too premature to be thinking about a ticker tape championship parade for this team.
Yes, there are logistics to be figured out since the fan base for the Warriors encompasses the entire Bay Area, not just the city of Oakland, but this all could be worked out in a situation where Golden State were in the NBA Finals and had a chance to clinch the title outright by winning a certain game. If, at that point you heard chatter come from officials about a parade, it would make total sense. You would expect them to then have a plan in place and ready to roll it out and share with the residents of Oakland and others who would come in from around the country for that celebration.
The focus now needs to be on the actual team itself and see if they can bounce back and continue to edge closer to winning this playoff series. It’s an old cliche but it rings true in this case, take it one game at a time. It is difficult to predict and play out a months worth of games when you don’t even know what will happen in the next one.
So while the effort to get a plan going and being able to have it all ironed out early is a nice thought, it looks out of place when it comes to a plan that is about a team winning a championship that they have yet to get close to reaching or clinching.
