As the longtime conductor of Oracle Arena’s deafening basketball symphony, Brett Yamaguchi knows when to hold off on the clanging cymbals.
If Stephen Curry or Klay Thompson goes on one of those crowd-rousing 3-point sprees, if Draymond Green is beating his chest after a defensive stop, the conductor will glance at a script carefully honed by a series of intense meetings and chuck it out the window.
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The State Farm Assist of the Night can wait. So can the T-shirt toss. They’ll get to the Look-A-Likes Cam another time.
Nothing beats 19,596 rabid Warriors fans, a cappella.
“We’re not going to step on top of them,’’ Yamaguchi, the team’s director of game operations, said. “We’re not going to try to add any prompts on top of audio or visual. If they’re going, we just let them go.”
With Oracle soon to fall silent, as only two or three games remain before the team moves to Chase Center in San Francisco next season, Yamaguchi is getting one last Oracle chance to leave his invisible imprint on the NBA Finals. The Warriors host Games 3 and 4 against the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday and Friday.
Though he has been with the team for 23 years, even hardcore fans might not know Yamaguchi’s name. And if they do, it’s because of his famous sibling.
Kristi Yamaguchi is the Olympic gold medal-winning figure skater and two-time World Champion from Fremont.
But that’s not who she is here.
“At Roar-acle,’’ Kristi said by phone, “I’m known as Brett’s sister.”
Kristi’s little brother runs the show here on game nights by orchestrating anything that falls under the umbrella of entertainment. Yamaguchi’s kingdom includes the anthem singers, the video replays, the music over the loudspeakers, the Armageddon-style lineup introductions, the on-court contests, the dance teams and even how often the cameras cut to Dancing Warriors Mom in her garish sweater.
If it doesn’t involve an actual basketball, Yamaguchi probably controls it from his headset at the scorer’s table. He’s connected from that seat to two entertainment hubs (one in the south tunnel, one near the north) as well as to the control room, the epicenter for videos and graphics.
Yamaguchi, 45, spends his night with an ear toward crowd noise, noting the game’s ebbs and flows, pressing the subtle cues that can define a home-court advantage.
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Kristi, as a former world-class competitor, is better than most at recognizing the power of one of the NBA’s most electric venues.
“When you’re looking for a shot in the arm and the crowd gets going, it’s hard not to rise to that energy,’’ Brett’s big sister said. “I think he’s done a really great job about keeping current with what little thousand whistles are out there to get the crowd into the game. It’s pretty known throughout the league how amazing Dub Nation is, right?”
One trick Brett Yamaguchi has learned over the years is that, when timed right, showing a famous Bay Area athlete on the video board is crowd-noise gold. Even after all these years, there are decibels to be mined from Baron Davis, Jason Richardson and Chris Mullin. “Those guys all get great reaction,’’ Yamaguchi said. In fact, pretty much any former Warrior will do. Mo Speights got a standing ovation a few weeks ago. David West brought down the house on opening night.
Among other sports stars, Barry Bonds always provides a jolt. But Yamaguchi tends to steer clear of another big-hitter, Ronnie Lott, because he’s at Oracle so often it loses its punch. Once upon a time, Yamaguchi figured that showing Bay Area-born quarterback Tom Brady on the video board would rock the house. But it flopped with an Oakland crowd that knows him as that lucky dude from the Tuck Rule game.
“That didn’t go over very well, unfortunately,’’ Yamaguchi said softly.
Entertainment celebrities can pack a sound wallop, too, although Yamaguchi has to keep their allegiances in mind. Beyoncé and Jay-Z? Sure, they’re generally sports-neutral and the Warriors crowd gives them a warm welcome. But during the run of NBA Finals against Cleveland, the game-ops team avoided showing Rhianna, the noted LeBron James enthusiast.
“We do our due diligence not to put people in bad situations,’’ Yamaguchi said.
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His favorite thing about Oracle, though, are the times when he doesn’t have to do a darn thing.
“Just being organic,’’ Yamaguchi said. “We definitely prompt fans with ‘De-fense’ and things like that throughout a game, but there’s a buzz in this building. Bay Area fans are knowledgeable and passionate about basketball, and we’re fortunate to be part of it, to have that.
“I have counterparts (with other NBA teams) who probably need to prompt their fans a little bit harder to get them going. But if our fans start the ‘Warrr-iiii-orrrrrrrs’ chant on their own, we just back off the pedal.”
Brett and Kristi grew up in Fremont, and their sports-loving parents used to take them to Warriors games even when the team was lousy. Brett can’t remember the first time he came to this storied venue, but he suspects it was around the time then-New York Knicks guard Doc Rivers came crashing down face first on the hardwood.
“He was picking up his teeth off the floor,’’ he said. “Those type of memories stick out to me.”
That seems like the kind of thing the son of a dentist would remember. Dr. Jim Yamaguchi, and his wife, Carole, were longtime Warriors season-ticket holders. But in the days between Run TMC and the “We Believe” teams, no amount of in-game entertainment could hold their attention. Jim and Carole had a deal: If the Warriors trailed by 20-30 points at halftime, they would leave.
“And I’m sorry to say it happened a lot,’’ Jim Yamaguchi said.
The Warriors were in the midst of these doldrums when Brett, a three-year varsity point guard for Moreau Catholic High, found his NBA calling. This was starting with the 1995-96 season, which he notes was also the rookie season for No. 1 overall pick Joe Smith.
Yamaguchi started just a tad lower than Smith in the hierarchy. But after a year of demonstrating his work ethic and creativity, he got his big break. “I was elevated to intern,’’ he said.
(Photo of Kristi Yamaguchi: Douglas C. Pizac/AP)Back then, sports entertainment was still a quaint enterprise. Maybe the teams played some music between the quarter breaks. There were certainly no gargantuan videoboards with live videos or replays. It was just an LED display with basic game information.
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T-shirt guns? Yamaguchi and the rest of the “game-night ambassadors,’’ as they were called in those days, came out unarmed.
“We were doing it by hand,’’ he said, “hopefully, you had a good baseball arm.”
The antics of that era often served to distract from — not enhance — the action on the court. The slogan for a while was “It’s A Great Time Out,’’ and it was up to employees to make sure that families could still have fun even while watching a team that posted consecutive records of 19-63, 21-29, 19-63 (again) and 17-65.
The Warriors took to hiring a few free-agent mascots (including the San Diego Chicken) to help stir the crowd. For the 1996-97 season, when the team played in San Jose while the Coliseum Arena was being renovated, the team created its own mascot — Berserker — who made about as much impact of the draft picks in those days.
“He was forgotten pretty quickly,’’ Yamaguchi said. “He lasted longer than the Crazy Crab, but not much longer than that.”
But as the team got better, the game-operations department got more sophisticated, too. During this visit to Oracle, during an off-day after Game 1, Yamaguchi showed off two cockpit-sized control rooms. This is where decisions get made about what goes onto the Jumbotron, and to the LED ribbon boards throughout the arena.
Nothing represents the evolution of the NBA game-day philosophy more than the introduction of the starting lineups. Simply reading off the name no longer suffices, and even thunderous music seems inefficient. That’s when, for big games, the Warriors started adding “all the pyro and things of that nature,’’ Yamaguchi said.
At first, the Warriors picked their spots. But then it started feeling like a letdown on nights when they played it straight. Fans were, like, hey, what gives? Why are there no flames coming off the backboard?
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“It went from maybe five times to 10 times a year and then after a while it was like, ‘Just do it every game,’’’ Yamaguchi said. “I think that’s kind of how it’s evolved. That’s the age-old question, right? It’s traditionalists against the new generation of how you engage people and engage the fans.
“It has turned into more of a wrestling thing, right? Lights are flying everywhere.”
With the new demands, Yamaguchi’s game days begin with a 9:30 a.m. arrival at the team’s downtown Oakland headquarters. That’s where he’ll go over, for the umpteenth time, an Excel spreadsheet that lists what happens minute-by-minute later that night.
5:33:15 – Lights out
5:33:30 – National Anthem
5:35:30 – Visitor player introduction (50 percent lights)
5:36:30 – Lights out Prompt
5:36:40 – Warriors Player Introduction
The list also includes the timing for dozens of other “sponsorship reads,” dance team appearances and promos spread out at carefully plotted intervals. What separates Yamaguchi, his co-workers say, is that the former point guard knows when to make adjustments on the fly. And it can make a difference in the action.
“When we get our crowd behind us and gain some momentum,’’ guard Shaun Livingston said Tuesday, “we’re tough to stop.”
Kristi said Brett runs the game from the scorer’s table the way he did on the court during his high school playing days. He has the same temperament. “Intense when he needed to be,’’ she said. “But not like Draymond Green.” Then, as now, Brett also took a strength-in-numbers approach. A few days after his interview with The Athletic, he followed up with an email to stress that the operations department gets the credit “but this production comes together from a collection of talented departments and co-workers.”
Jeff Addiego, hired as a Warriors game-operations intern the year after Yamaguchi, said that mentality shows up on game-nights, too.
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“Brett grew up playing basketball and really understanding the game,’’ said Addiego, now the Warriors’ senior director of youth basketball. “And I think he understands when to let the game kind of speak for itself and when to rely on the other game-op elements to really bring the crowd into it.
“When we’re seeing these amazing things on the court that’s been done by this current team, he’s not doing anything to overshadow that. He’s letting the play on the court speak for itself. … Sometimes when I go to other NBA arenas, you don’t see that same feel from their game-ops folks.”
There are, at most, three more games to be played in this unforgettable building and, for now, Yamaguchi is fending off nostalgia with denial. He refuses to think about the ending, at least not yet. “It’ll probably hit me whenever that day is, but I’ve been coming to work here since I was 21 years old,’’ he said.
The move to Chase Center next season will offer his crew a bountiful high-tech harvest, including a video board that will be six times larger than the one at Oracle.
But Yamaguchi has to finish his work at this place first, doing what he can to help the Warriors close off the venue with a championship.
Like his big sister, he wants to stick the landing.
— Reported from Oakland
(Photo: Daniel Brown / The Athletic)
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