On Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014, Golden State Warriors majority owner Joe Lacob was invited for a Q&A session hosted by Phil Sanderson. The following is a transcript of the talk, re-ordered by topic, and some quotes that we tweeted out last night have been highlighted in bold.
The first part dealt with managing the Warriors.
How did the team come together, the chemistry, the franchise core?
That’s a long story, too. When we bought the team, we had a really dynamic backcourt. You may remember Monta Ellis, and Stephen Curry was a young emerging star. They were similar, though. They were both undersized and the question was — we had principles from Day One that we stated on a piece of paper — we said we’re going to build around defense, rebounding, and size. Defense, rebounding and size. And it’s just a philosophy you have to have, a philosophy.
That’s not what the Warriors were. We were built around fun, fast, speed, all those kinds of things, and it is entertaining, even when they were losing. That’s why they kind of drew reasonably well, but to win, you win around defense and size and rebounding, I believed, and so we had to make a first big decision to, Number One, let Steph Curry blossom — and with Monta Ellis, he wasn’t ever going to blossom — Number Two, we had to get a big center.
We had to take a big gamble. You don’t normally get to trade small for big. We did, had a chance to get Andrew Bogut, who was injured of course. We were not going to get a guy that’s perfectly healthy, that’s seven-feet tall and great, for a 6-foot-3 guy, I mean, so we had to take that risk.
It was highly criticized, as you remember at the time, and very, very difficult decision internally because, personally, I had become close with Monta — great player and he had great heart. He had a lot of qualities that we really admired, but in order to accomplish the rebuilding we had to make this funda,mental move and what really enabled that actually happened with the drafting of Klay Thompson, who was our first pick that we’d ever drafted as an organization.
We picked him at No. 11 in the first round and, today, would be No. 1 or 2 in that draft. He was a 6-foot-7 guard that could shoot the lights out. We didn’t know if he could play defense that well. He’s been better than we thought. He’s size, defense again, those orientations. Go big at every position. Prototype big. So the idea of pairing him (with Curry), we thought was going to be what we were built around, and then with Bogut in the middle.
Of course, the subsequent drafts, and I could go through all of those, but it’s been a strategy really from Day One, what we are trying to architect in terms of a team. We stuck to it.
We had great people that we hired to evaluate talent, including Jerry West, fifty years, a legend in the business. The actual NBA logo is Jerry West. He is the logo. He’s been a coach. He’s been a general manager. He’s been a guy involved in organizations for a long, long time. We needed that advice and went out and brought him in, too, as an advisor on our Board of Directors, from a business standpoint and also from basketball side. He’s not the GM, but he’s an advisor.
So, having the right people in place to make the right Draft picks and continue with this strategy has allowed us to build a team, I guess people think, is pretty good right now, since we’re ranked Number One in the league.
Over 60% of NBA players go broke within five years after retiring. What’s your advice to NBA players?
You have to remember, these guys come from a very different background. Can you imagine if you were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old and suddenly coming into all that money and you had nothing? I mean, it’s an amazing transformation for them and they have all these hangers-on, which is the part that we counsel them on.
We try to make sure they get good advice. The NBA does a really good job at this, too, at a league level. And, you know, they can only do so much. We have a lot more impact. We’re closer to them all the time, so the best advice we can give is, “Don’t spend your money.” It’s as simple as that and, fortunately, we have a lot of good players.
One of the things I didn’t say earlier, not only size and rebounding and defense, but character was very important from Day One. I wanted to get rid of anything that was a bad character.
Danny Ainge of the Boston Celtics, when I was a limited (partner) there, gave me this piece of advice. He said you can live, no problem, with one bad guy on your team, one “dufus”. Two, maybe you can get by. Three, you can’t, destroys the team.
And so I kind of always remembered that and, in our case, we don’t have one bad guy on the team this year. I mean, we do not have one guy that even comes close to that.
Steph Curry is the most amazing person, if you ever met him. Everything you see is absolutely true. He’s unbelievable. His family is incredible. He’s just a role model amongst role models, but we’ve got a lot of other guys like that and so we have smart guys. It’s a little easier in our situation, but there are guys that really do need the advice and somehow we have to get to them.
Do you have a prediction on how many wins this year?
Absolutely not (laughs). I’m not going to do any predicting. I will say that our goal, because it’s great to have goals, is to be in the top four in the Western Conference, because we would have homecourt advantage in the first round of the playoffs. That was our goal last year. We didn’t quite make it, came close. We’ve gotten better every year and we’re on track, as long as we don’t have injuries, to do it this year.
Now, the ultimate goal is to win an NBA title and I think we have a shot. We’re really good. Everything’s falling into place. If we can keep people healthy, we have a chance to be competing for it and that’s all you can ask, because you never know what’s going to happen. But our real goal is just make sure we have homecourt advantage and get to the playoffs and then see what damage we can do.
What’s the hardest part of being an owner?
Well, they’re a lot of hard parts. This is harder than anything I ever dreamed it would be, but it’s very much like in venture, you have to stick to it. You have to raise money in advance, you have to do all those things that are really solid things to do in building a business, but there’s two things that are really different.
One is, as I said, immediate returns. You get evaluated every single day by everybody because everybody is an expert.
In sports, and unlike ten or fifteen years ago even, there’s the Internet and bloggers and, I mean, everybody has an opinion. The media isn’t the media that it used to be. The media is everybody.
That’s the Number One change you have to be prepared to understand. That to deal with it, and frankly to have a very thick skin, to make decisions that you think are right, no matter what.
I have had to put myself in that position, being criticized heavily. I got booed by twenty thousand people. I know we’re all referring to it. That’s true. That did happen and it was really personally very, very hard. I didn’t want that. I didn’t like that, but in some ways if you’re going to buy a sports team, this what you sign up for and you have to have an expectation that you are going to be criticized. It is going to happen.
By the way, we’re on top of the world right now. If we lose in the first round of the playoffs, I’m going to be crap and I won’t be invited to speak here, so I’m just telling you, that’s just the way it is and I have a very long-term view about it and a lot of expectations about it, but I can’t worry about those kinds of things. It is what it is.
What is your biggest regret?
Are you talking about the Warriors? Okay, because I have a lot of regrets on certain companies I didn’t quite do right when I was at Kleiner.
Biggest regret? You know, I don’t think that way, so this is a little problematic question for me. I’m almost looking forward — I don’t like to look back, you know. I don’t really have a regret, to be honest. I guess I could sit here and try to drum one up, but I really think we go do things.
We decide what we’re going to do and we go do it. It’s all about action and it’s about if you need people, hire the best people. If you need money, go get the money. I’m very, very aggressive about all this. I think you have to be in any business, but particularly in this business.
And, you know, there’s always trades. I will tell you, there’s a couple little things that have to do with players, which probably take too long to describe here, but Jeremy Lin was a guy that grew up on the Peninsula playing basketball with my son, actually.
I knew him really well and we wound up bringing him in, signing him to a contract, even though he wasn’t drafted. You know, he went to Harvard, of course. Stanford blew that. They had a chance to bring him in, so that’s a regret in that we had him.
I had a coaching staff that didn’t really use him and didn’t see what we saw and he wound up going somewhere else and becoming Jeremy Lin. That’s a little bit of a regret that I didn’t trust my own gut just a little bit stronger when it came down to the decision. It was complicated and there were trade-offs. It’s like anything else and I can’t get into what those trade-offs were, but there were.
You know, you hate to see something get away. What I hate more than anything else in the world for our business is to develop assets and then let them go somehow or have to let them go, because you have only so many resources.
We did something that we haven’t discussed, which was very important and, not to belabor this, we wanted to develop future management and future players, not just the stars, so we bought a minor league team in North Dakota. Bismarck, North Dakota. And my son, Kirk, went and ran it for a year and it was his idea, actually.
We developed it. We moved it to the Bay Area. We found a location in Santa Cruz, didn’t have an arena. We built an arena in, like, an incredibly short period of time, in a hostile environment in terms of regulatory and whatever, and here we are, three years later.
We were just there over the last weekend. We sell out every single game, if you haven’t been. It’s an incredible venue, 2,500 seats. We’ve developed young players. We’ve had more call-ups than any team in the NBA because we have a great coaching staff down there.
We take our young management in their twenties, we hire them, and put them there and they do the miniature version of what they’re going to do, maybe, at the NBA level, and we bring them forward.
We just did that with our sideline reporter this year. We did that with a PR person. So that kind of thing, I have regret about developing talent and then losing it, like Jeremy Lin. I want to develop those people and bring them forward in our organization and hopefully, if they get a promotion to some other organization, that’s much better. That’s great.
[Stay tuned for the last part of the transcription]
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