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 previously have been highlighted in bold.
The first part dealt with managing the Warriors. The second part dealt with constructing the Warriors roster and regretting letting Jeremy Lin leave.
[NOTE: The Warriors are in Los Angeles today for the Christmas game against the Clippers.]I’m sure there are a lot of Steve Ballmer stories?
Yes, there are.
First of all everyone asks me all the time, ‘What’s it like when you go to those NBA Board of Governors meetings?’ because they’re always interested in these owners.
Let me tell you something, it’s an interesting group (laughs). It’s very different than anything I’ve ever seen. Ballmer — it’s kind of an interesting genealogy here because it has a lot to do with us, actually.
When Vivek Ranadive was one of our limited partners — and many of you know Vivek from TIBCO — Vivek wound up buying the Sacramento Kings and keeping them in Sacramento, but the competitor to doing that was a Ballmer group in Seattle and they were bidding a lot more money, by the way.
So, interestingly, I was involved (laughs) to some extent in this because we’d rather, frankly, have a team succeed and the NBA would rather have a team succeed in a market like Sacramento.
People think maybe we didn’t want them to be there. We did. We wanted them to be there. I’d rather them be there than San Jose, if we’re ever going to have a second team in the Bay Area, right? Now, if they did, they did, and I think we’d be pretty tough to compete with, but the truth is, Sacramento was a really great market for selling tickets.
I don’t know if you know this, they used to be number three in the NBA like fifteen years ago. So they can sell tickets they can be successful.
Vivek won that deal. He’s come out of our group and he’s done a great job of putting together, building a new arena very successful already, and Ballmer — interestingly, one our limiteds again, Dennis Wong, who some of you may know, was Ballmer’s college roomate, so they were very, very good friends and when Steve was thinking about buying the (Los Angeles) Clippers, when that whole Donald Sterling thing erupted over the summer, he came to me and said, ‘Hey look, can you help us here?’ And I did, in the background, sort of, and analyzed the numbers that they had and those kinds of things.
So, interesting story about that was, I didn’t tell them what to pay, obviously, and the story came back about Ballmer was in terms of deciding how much to pay. He was just going to, basically, whatever number was that the other guy was going to pay, he was going to pay more because he figured it was his art budget.
That’s the term that came back (laughs). Instead of buying art, he was just going to buy a team and, okay, maybe it wasn’t that way for me, but that was kind of a funny little term when I heard that, and so he could afford to do it and he wanted to do it and he’s passionate.
We want passionate owners. We want people that are in it to have fun and, you know by the way, he paid a lot of money, but I’ll bet you he does well, is the truth of the matter. He’s a smart guy. He’s going to be very very aggressive, as you realize.
And another funny thing that happened, a little Ballmer story, too, was we went back to the first Board of Governor meetings recently and it was his first meeting and there was a lunch right before the meeting actually starts and, you know, I remember when I went to my first one, I kind of walked in kind of nervous, ‘Who are all these people?’ and I recognize Mark Cuban, ‘oh wow’ and all this stuff and I’d known Mark from before, but Ballmer walks in.
It was about five owners sitting at this one table and he sits down at the table and people started a little bit of conversation and he looked over at me and I said, “I just want you to know, I really like you and I’m so glad that you’re going to be part of the NBA. I hate your team. I hate them. I hate your team, but I really like you.”
Pardon me for the language, but that’s exactly what I said and he looked at me like, ‘Who would say something like that?’ (laughs), but it was kind of a funny moment — awkward moment, the five other guys are sitting there like (shows a stunned face).
Actually, for the next ten years is my prediction, it’s going to be Clippers-Warriors in the West battling it out for supremacy. If I have anything to do with it and he has anything to do with it, which I think we will, and because, you know what it is, it’s all about — you can just see it like any other business, you go run a venture business, you see these CEOs who are so aggressive and if they’re smart and they’re aggressive, you know they’re going to be successful.
You can just tell and Ballmer, he is going to be maniacal. He is going to be tough as hell to deal with and I know I am because I will do anything to win. Anything. And he knows that and we are and I’ve got to tell you, the (Los Angeles) Lakers are a great organization in the past, but it’s like a deer in the headlights going up against Ballmer. I mean, he’s going to be maniacal.
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