The G League is bringing another team to the Bay Area

More professional basketball is coming to the Bay Area, and that’s never a bad thing. A third team is joining the region, and they’re set to become the first one that doesn’t have “Warriors” in the name.

The G League is adding a new team (the Pro Pathway team) for the 2020-21 season, which we’ve known about for a while. But now we know the location: Walnut Creek. The news was first reported by Shams Charania of The Athletic and Stadium.

The Pro Pathway team will become the only team in the league that isn’t affiliated with an NBA organization. The NBA is adding the team, and allowing it to dole out larger contracts to entice some of the top prospects in the nation to join the professional ranks right out of high school, rather than spending a year playing at the NCAA level.

There have already been a fair share of commits to the Pro Pathway team, including Jalen Green, ESPN’s top-ranked player in the country.

This doesn’t mean much for the Golden State Warriors, other than having it be logistically easier to scout some prospects (players on the Pro Pathway team will still have to enter the draft in order to join the NBA). But for local basketball fans? It means that now they can hit Warriors games in San Francisco, affiliated G League games in Santa Cruz, and Pro Pathway games in Walnut Creek. That’s a whole lot of professional basketball for one region (now can we please get a WNBA team?).

The G League now has 29 team: the Pro Pathway team, plus affiliates for every team except the Denver Nuggets and Portland Trail Blazers.