Warriors’ Lacob tells his ‘worst moment’
Now that the Warriors have won 50 games again and are selling pricey season tickets to their prospective arena by the truckload, it seems like ages ago that co-owner Joe Lacob was ferociously booed by the team’s fans.
It was March 20, 2012, a year and a half after Lacob and Peter Guber bought the team. It was a week after the franchise traded guard Monta Ellis to Milwaukee in a multiplayer deal that brought the Warriors an injured center, Andrew Bogut.
Warriors fans might have forgotten how Lacob was treated that night, as he prepared to unveil Chris Mullin’s No. 17 hanging in the rafters at Oracle Arena. Lacob hasn’t forgotten. He pointed to that experience as a lesson to participants in the Sports Innovation Conference on Wednesday at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business — a lesson in how to handle adversity.
“It was probably the single worst moment” of his life, he told a crowded auditorium. “I returned 400 emails that night.” The next morning he told a radio talk show, “I would have booed me, too.”
After his talk at the graduate school, he told The Chronicle, “I never slept that night. I was so distraught, to be frank. I didn’t expect that to happen. Who’s prepared for that?” His fiancee, Nicole Curran, “was crying” on the side of the court, he said. “My kids were there, too. I could see the look on their faces. They were nervous for me.”
In an hourlong talk and the later interview, Lacob touched on other points:
The difficulty of getting the Chase Center off the ground. “I’ve spent 30 years in venture capital. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything, including turning around the Warriors as a basketball team, as hard as building an arena. By the time we are done with it, we will have owned the team for nine years and we will have worked on that project for eight years.”
Giving his players and head coach Steve Kerr the OK to say whatever they want — be it about President Trump or anything else. “I believe players should say whatever they want as long as they don’t embarrass the league. My job is a little bit different. I have fans that are customers. The only thing I worry about is, I don’t want to offend any of them.”
Firing Mark Jackson as head coach: “Mark Jackson did a really good job for us. He did what he was hired to do. He created among the basketball team a can-do attitude. He had them all working together. We did go 23, 47, 51 wins in three years.” But Lacob decided the organization wasn’t “working all that well” with Jackson. “That was a gut call that we needed to make, to go from good to great.”
Sponsoring a WNBA team after the arena is done: “I have a past history” as a primary investor in the ill-fated American Basketball League. “It’s unfinished business. I think the Bay Area could sustain it, and maybe it would be one of the most successful WNBA franchises. We will be interested in that at the right time.”
Earlier Wednesday, another keynote speaker, Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber, said his league took a big hit when the U.S. men failed to make this summer’s World Cup in Russia.
“We miss the opportunity of having our sport be the center of conversation in the summertime,” he said. “If we miss it again, it will be catastrophic.”
Another keynote session at the conference featured Stanford political-science professor and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and NCAA President Mark Emmert discussing the future of college sports. Both, however, insisted that their session be off-therecord, and neither would grant interviews.