Lacob did expand on why why Golden State would welcome the oft-injured 38-year-old reserve back to The Bay with open arms, though: “By the way, this guy didn’t play very much I’m looking at on my screen, Andre here. But I think you had a huge impact,” he said. “That does not go without notice. Huge impact. I watch you on the sidelines, I watch you in the locker room, and that was part of our strategy, too, to get you back.”
Tag: Joe Lacob
Warriors owner Joe Lacob interested in buying MLB team
Joe Lacob’s pursuit of the A’s isn’t over. He remains interested in buying the team — priced at $1.18 billion in Forbes’ franchise valuations, 27th out of 30 teams in MLB — if Fisher, whom Lacob calls a friend, ever agrees to sell. Would that happen if Fisher strikes out at Howard Terminal? We don’t know because Fisher never wants to be interviewed. “I’ve had a standing offer to buy the A’s from John Fisher for I don’t even know how long. Over a decade,” Lacob said. “It’s up to him; it’s his business. It would have been smarter to sell to me a long time ago because we would have been partners, and he would have been able to own a part of the Warriors as well. I tried to tell him that. I would have done a ratio deal.”
“This never really came out, but I had …
“This never really came out, but I had an agreement to buy the Oakland A’s, literally,” Lacob confirmed after Schott briefed me on those negotiations. According to Schott, his attorney told Lacob, “Here’s the deal right here. If you want it, you can have it for this number. Meet the price, and it’s yours.” The number was $180 million, and both Schott and Lacob said qualifying wasn’t an issue. A verbal agreement was reached, and Lacob said he was in Southern California playing in a golf tournament the day he was supposed to hear from MLB. Lacob brought his phone onto the course but didn’t get a call. Through his adviser, he tried calling MLB the next day, and no one was taking his calls. This went on for four days, and Lacob eventually realized Selig felt more comfortable with an old acquaintance — Wolff.
What did Lacob do? On the advice of …
What did Lacob do? On the advice of then-NBA Commissioner David Stern, he bought into his hometown Boston Celtics as a minority partner and built relationships with league honchos. “When the Warriors came up in 2010, I had an advantage, ironically — maybe my only advantage — over Larry Ellison, which was I knew everybody in the league really well,” said Lacob, who partnered with Peter Guber to buy the Warriors in 2010, five years after MLB denied him, for $450 million. The team is now valued by Forbes at $5.6 billion.
Morant’s salary is a fraction of what …
Morant’s salary is a fraction of what he deserves, which is bad for him and, in the harsh reality of the competitive NBA, magical for his team. To contend for the NBA title, you typically need to win north of 50 games. The Warriors’ math is that if Curry generates 15 wins, then there’s some tap dancing—and cap dancing—to figure out how to afford the other 35-40. After paying Steph, the Warriors had only $67 million left to spend under the salary cap. That would only buy 20 more wins at league-average prices, and who wants to win a measly 35 games? So to leap back into title contention, the Warriors shattered the salary cap and set all-time spending records. Over the broad sweep of NBA history, we see the occasional Joe Lacob, James Dolan, Mikhail Prokhorov, or Paul Allen—billionaires determined to build dynasties with gold bricks. It usually doesn’t work. Even when it does, the league stacks on such punitive luxury-tax bills that everyone eventually loses their appetite for overspending.
Bob Myers warned of an eventual salary …
Bob Myers warned of an eventual salary limit, an undefined financial threshold where Joe Lacob would finally say no. That red light came on the first night of free agency. The Golden State Warriors let Gary Payton II walk. They offered him the taxpayer mid-level, which sits at $6.4 million. He received north of $8 million from Portland, plus an extra year on an incentivized deal. The difference in the tax penalty — somewhere around $15 million extra in the immediate, a whole lot more throughout a longer-term deal — caused Lacob and the Warriors to balk. It stung several in the organization, per sources. They’d found Payton and grown to not only love the person but also understand the value of his unique skill set. It translated to winning. For the first time, they’d failed to retain one of their own due to an unwillingness to meet a financial demand.
Those prospects—James Wiseman, Jonathan …
Those prospects—James Wiseman, Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody—had a negligible impact on this run. Had the Warriors lost, Myers and Lacob would have been lit up by Warriors fans. But the gambit worked. “No one’s done it, I know. And we got criticized,” Lacob said. “But this is what we’re doing. We believe in this plan. That’s our plan. And look, I hate to say I told you so …”
They can say it now, with confidence …
They can say it now, with confidence and perhaps an earned bit of smugness. They pulled it off. The Warriors are champions again. Their present is assured, and their future is bright. As Lacob sees it, with the benefits of modern sports science, Curry, Thompson and Green can play into their late 30s. The prospects will grow into greater roles and help ease their burden as the years advance. “I never thought we were done,” Lacob said. “Personally, I think we’re set up for the rest of the decade.”
Magic Johnson: Congratulations to …
“Whoever we drafted, we didn’t think …
“Whoever we drafted, we didn’t think they’d be a reason we won the championship or not,” Myers told The Athletic. “So we thought, let’s just draft the best players who were on the board. A lot of people wanted us to trade them for a star. This is not said in the vein of ‘I told you so,’ but we did think Andrew Wiggins could fill that role. We did. Not a lot of people did. But we wanted to see him in that role of the fourth guy.”