Name That Team! How the Sharks and the Golden State Warriors Got Their Names

What’s in a name? Or, more specifically, a sports team name?

This week, we’re answering questions from two Bay Curious listeners about how a couple of our Bay Area sports teams got their names.

Why aren’t they the Oakland Warriors?

Bay Curious listener Alan Chazaro is a lifelong Golden State Warriors basketball fan. He lives in the East Bay, and he’s always thought it was weird that even though the Warriors have played their home games in Oakland since the 1970s, they’re called the Golden State Warriors.

“I’ve always kind of taken it as an insult that they were never known as the Oakland Warriors,” Alan said. The Warriors are the only team in the NBA — and one of the few in all of U.S. professional sports — not to be named after a city or state. They’re not the Oakland Warriors or the California Warriors.

It dates back to 1971 when then-owner Franklin Mieuli planned on splitting the team’s home games between the Bay Area and San Diego. He thought the “California Warriors” sounded too much like the Cal Bears of UC Berkeley, so he went with Golden State.

A recent Bay Curious article explains why, after decades in Oakland, the team’s name hasn’t changed.

We could’ve been rooting for the ‘San Jose Rubber Puckies’?

When professional hockey came to San Jose in the early 1990s, one of the first orders of business was to find a name. Matt Levine was the franchise’s second-ever employee, and he was tasked with picking out a name.

After some internal brainstorming, Levine and his colleagues decided to hold a “name the team” sweepstakes. They put a simple ad in the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune and San Jose Mercury News, and were flooded with thousands of responses.

“There was a young man up in Vancouver B.C. who submitted 250 names, and he said one of these names has to be the one you’re going to select,” Levine said.

The top 15 suggestions, in alphabetical order, were: Blades, Breakers, Breeze, Condors, Fog, Gold, Golden Gaters, Golden Skaters, Grizzlies, Icebreakers, Knights, Redwoods, Sea Lions, Sharks and Waves.

Eventually, they landed on Sharks. It was unique, exciting and would lend itself to a very cool logo.

Read the full story to see some of the zanier name suggestions and find out why the most-suggested name wasn’t selected.