OAKLAND – When the NBA on Saturday revisited the building formerly known as Oracle Arena after nearly six years away, those most familiar with the high-voltage vibe inside allowed themselves to inhale the fading fragrance of a house that once had the energy of a living organism.

Call All-Star Weekend the NBA’s gift, likely its last, to Oakland.

Some adored Oracle, now Oakland Arena, because it was theirs, they felt the love and they knew it was genuine.

“It’s pretty dope,” said Stephen Curry, whom the crowd showered with rich cheers upon his return to the room where he and the Warriors routinely destroyed visitors.

Some were uncomfortable in the glass-and-concrete disc because they knew they didn’t belong. They were wearing enemy colors before a crowd that took no prisoners.

“Being in this arena gives me, like, nightmares,” said Los Angeles Clippers guard James Harden, who as a member of the Houston Rockets, as on the blunt end of a heated rivalry with Golden State. “Because I had to go against (Curry). It was like a real battle. We literally created teams just to beat the Warriors. And somehow, some way, they always … ended up in The Finals.”

The golden era of the Warriors – and the arena – ended in June 2019, when they departed after losing Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals. They returned to the Finals in 2022, winning with a roster rebuilt but still with Draymond Green and Curry at its core, but the intensity felt inside Chase did not match that which vibrated throughout Oracle.

“This was the hardest place to play in the league,” said Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson, a former Warriors assistant (after the Oracle years) who is one of the coaches for the All-Star Game on Sunday at Chase.

It’s unfair to ask Chase, hard as it might try, to replicate the gusto of Oracle. The acoustics at Chase do their part, but corporate crowds in well-appointed suites simply do not muster the same level of sustained intensity. Rarely do they transmit enough energy to lift the players on the floor to levels they didn’t know they could reach.

The Warriors reached the NBA Finals in each of their last five seasons at Oracle. They were 218-43, including the postseason, with an 11.5-point differential. They posted consecutive seasons with a 39-2 record at home. They were not invincible at Oracle, but they felt they were.

So, yes, Curry enjoyed reliving the good times during an All-Star Weekend practice at Oracle before the HBCU Classic game featuring Morehouse College and Tuskegee University.

“This is a moment for sure,” Curry said. “I think the idea of knowing we made the move to Chase Center and been in San Francisco the last six seasons, to have a little bit of a moment to honor and reminisce the 47 years that we played in this building, the 10 years that I had growing up in the game inside these walls, the energy in this building that can come back just like that. I’ve enjoyed it to the fullest.”

Curry spent the first 10 seasons of his NBA career at Oracle. Won three championships and two MVP awards, including the only with a unanimous vote. Oracle is where Klay Thompson scored a record 37 points in one quarter. It’s where, in the 2007 playoffs, 6-foot-3 Warriors guard Baron Davis, dunked over Utah forward Andrei Kirilenko’s 7-foot-4 wingspan with such force the sellout crowd maintained its roar for more than a minute.

Oracle Arena is where an Oakland boy named Damian Lillard would go to see what he had to do to make his NBA dream come alive in manhood.

And it’s where Lillard, on the eve of his ninth All-Star Game appearance, embraced the nostalgia afforded by the NBA’s decision to split the weekend event between San Francisco’s Chase and the Oakland Arena.

“I thought it was a great idea,” Lillard said. “Especially with what’s happening with the professional teams in Oakland right now. Growing up close by here, driving by and looking at the Coliseum and seeing Oracle and how dead it is, when there was so much energy in it when I was a kid with the Raiders, the A’s, the Warriors being here, concerts, AND1 Mixtape tour coming through here, Globetrotters.

“I remember a lot about this parking lot. One of the first things I asked when I got here was, ‘Are they doing Saturday night at Oracle?’ Just because I would have loved to see that energy be here with the professional sports teams being taken away.”

One year after the Warriors crossed the bay, the NFL Oakland Raiders departed the Coliseum, adjacent to the arena, for Las Vegas. MLB’s Oakland A’s, who arrived in 1968, played their last game at the Coliseum last September. 

The complex that represented Oakland sports is fully abandoned. Or it was. Until Friday and Saturday, when stars came and shared memories. When the old arena roared once more.

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