Q&A: Warriors GM Bob Myers, Part 1

Nine months after engineering the Golden State Warriors’ first playoff appearance and series victory since 2007, General Manager Bob Myers sat down with Basketball Insiders’ Nate Duncan in the midst of another solid season.  In part one of a two-part interview, Myers discusses the Warriors’ approach in building from his hiring in 2011 to their 2013 playoff success.

The first thing I wanted to ask you about in discussing how this team was built is, what is really the goal of the organization? Obviously, there is wanting to win, but is it being a contender, is it winning one championship, is it winning multiple championships, because obviously you might proceed very differently in pursuit of many of those goals.

Myers: Well it’s the right question. I think winning consistently is the goal of any organization, it’s certainly the goal of ours and when you say winning, you mean winning at the highest level, winning championships. That’s the goal here. We think we’re in a market that can be attractive to players. We know we have ownership that supports spending in the right ways and we’ve got an unbelievable fan base, so we’re set up and positioned to be what we consider a championship contending team if not now, in the future. That’s what we’re building towards, whether it’s incrementally–we don’t set a timeline as to when it will happen. The way we operate within our front office and ownership, it’s always trying to get better each and every day, and sometimes things happen sooner than you like and sometimes they happen later than you like, but the end goal is and will always remain winning championships and doing it over as long of a period of time as you can. I think that’s the goal of anybody and we’ve seen organizations that have been able to do that, and we would like to become one of those.

Is there an understanding though that certain moves, obviously to contend now, may have a detrimental effect later on and make it harder?

Myers: Yeah, you always have to balance, you have to be realistic about where you are as an organization, where your team is. Sometimes organizations can get in trouble when they overreach and make a play that is perceived to be a play towards a championship, but in hindsight you look back and it’ll be looked at as, instead of a play towards a championship, a short-term move that cost you in the future. So you have to be smart. You’d really like to have a roster that’s balanced with youth and veterans so you’re always having players in the pipeline as your organization grows, and having those young players around veterans also helps them develop. But you don’t want to get into a situation where you have an entire roster that’s aging. You also don’t want to be in a situation where it’s all young players. So some type of mix of that is essential. You’re right though, the challenge is to make moves that are prudent and fit your timeline. You have to be realistic about what your timeline is and we think we’re building in the right direction. We don’t think we’re anywhere near where we need to be, but we think we’re going in the right direction.

You talked about the timeline. When you came on in roughly early 2011 and then going into that summer and after the lockout, what did you perceive this team’s timeline for contention to be at that point?

Myers: Well what’s left from when I started is our two players, David Lee and Steph Curry. So of the 13 or 14 guys three years ago, we’ve kept two. So it’s a total overhaul of the entire roster, whether it’s through draft, trade or free agency. We have I would say, right now 13 new players in two years, which is a big turnover. Ideally you’d like to have more continuity, but we weren’t having success with the roster that year, obviously. We did believe last year, we hoped we put together a team that could make the playoffs. So our goal this year, last year it was to make the playoffs, this year was to make a good showing in the playoffs, and maybe next year it’s more than that. But we try to be realistic about where we are, we want to go beyond the goal of last year, which was just making the playoffs, and this year maybe advance in the playoffs. Maybe advance further than we did last year. So you’re always trying to build. A lot of things factor into your success in the postseason. We do our best in the front office and as an organization to put together the most talented team, and trust in our coaching staff to develop the players we give them. And then we go from there, and see what happens.

In 2011 you’re 36-46 and there’s this sort of truth, we can debate how truthful that actually is, that you kind of don’t want to be in the middle, that that’s the worst place to be. Was there any thought that you might have to bottom out a little bit to improve in that 2011 timeframe?

Myers: Well, the goal was to upgrade our talent from that team, that was the goal all along. We didn’t have a ton of assets to deal via trade. One of our assets, who happened to be our best player at the time, was Monta Ellis. One of the philosophies of the organization was to get bigger. We really wanted to try and be big. This organization has been small for so long and has had some success in that way, but from ownership on down, we feel like size is imperative to compete consistently in the NBA. So we had an opportunity to trade a guard for a center, and I think those opportunities are rare, and we took advantage of it. And Bogut happened to be hurt at the time. I’m not sure we could have got him if he was healthy. If he was healthy that would have been fine, maybe that would have allowed us to make a push towards the playoffs. But the fact that he was hurt allowed us to see what the team was with a lot of our young assets. Every day we come to work, we’re trying to find ways to improve our roster. Whether that’s through current assets or future assets or developing organically through the players we have here. Every day we want to leave work a little bit better than when we came in.

Talk a little bit about the hiring of Mark Jackson. Obviously he had no coaching experience before. Basically, how did you know he was going to be good? It’s really hard to evaluate coaches who haven’t coached before.

Myers: Yeah, well it’s hard. It is hard to evaluate anybody, players, coaches, any hires you make are difficult. But in Mark we saw immediately, Joe [Lacob] as well as myself and people in the front office, immediately his ability to lead, his presence, and we think that’s invaluable in the NBA. It’s a long season, it’s a grind, and we knew immediately after talking to him for five, 10 minutes that he would capture the minds of the players. And we also knew that it was rare to find somebody that had the skill set he had in that he could lead and also had tremendous experience within the NBA as a player, as a broadcaster, at the point guard position. So we saw a lot of qualities that really endeared us towards him. He was smart enough, and he was surrounding himself with a great staff, but his ability to have his players believe in him and trust him has really changed the culture of the organization. I believe in his career, I think he was in the playoffs all but one year. So he’s a winner, comes from a winning background and that’s the type of change we were coveting and the type of change we needed.

One of the themes that I’ve sort of seen, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, in the moves and extensions that you’ve made is an embracing of calculated risk, with Curry, with trading for and then extending Bogut, their injury histories.  Do you feel you need to take calculated risks because only one team can win the championship every year and you have to pursue more high-ceiling strategies?

Myers: I think we as an organization, there’s a dual approach when we’re trying to evaluate talent and retaining players, trading for players, signing players, you want talented players, but you also want high character players. You’re going to face adversity through the course of a season and you want people that are able to sustain high character and composure when things get difficult. You don’t want people in your locker room that all of a sudden abandon ship when things are going the wrong direction. So we felt like with both those guys you referenced, and for that matter anybody that we’ve tried to bring in via draft, trade, free agency, we wanted high character people. And I think specifically to Curry and Bogut, if we were going to bet, we were going to bet on high character people, and we felt like with both there were certainly risks. There were certainly risks with Curry, I think if you look back when that decision was made, 50 percent of people were against it. I’m sure 50 percent of people were against Bogut. But we have to make difficult decisions, everybody in any front office of any professional sports organization has to because you’re dealing in the commodity of human people, so it’s not perfect. It’s not a machine, it’s a person, so you really have to weigh all the elements that go into resigning or extending a player: Who they are, what their talent level is, history of injury, projected potential injury. So it’s difficult, it’s not easy. And sometimes you’re going to get it right, sometimes you’re going to get it wrong. But we felt like with the moves we’ve made, we feel like we’re betting on the right kind of people, and the right kind of talent.

Check out part two of Duncan’s exclusive interview with Myers.