© Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
There’s something about supporting a bad team for a very long time that makes winning a championship seem not just like an impossible goal, but a prospect that’s almost unwelcome.
The Warriors’ President of Basketball Operations Bob Myers knows this feeling well, having grown up in Danville (a Monte Vista high school attendee) and supported the Warriors through childhood, and even through his UCLA days, when he was pressured to abandon the joke of a franchise that the then-Shaq-and-Kobe Lakers fans perceived the Warriors as.
Myers said he used to wear a bright orange Warriors sweatshirt when he went to Loyola University Law School in the late 1990s. It was a color choice that confounded Myers in retrospect. “When did we have orange as one of our team colors?” Myers joked. “How does that happen?”
When Myers was studying at Loyola with one of his Lakers friends in said sweatshirt, the friend stopped for a moment to address the sweatshirt, according to Myers.
“‘What are you doing man? You’re wearing that Warriors sweatshirt around… Why (are you wearing that sweatshirt)? You guys suck,’” Myers said his friend told him. At the time, Myers said he had a ride-or-die, lifer-type mentality about the Warriors, despite their identity.
“I think we got comfortable not succeeding, that became our identity… the have nots,” Myers said. “And we embraced that. I think that became our rallying cry, like we’re just never going to figure it out, and we kind of connected over that.”
But since Myers joined as an assistant general manager in 2011, those “have nots” have undergone one of the greatest shifts in fortune that any sports franchise has undergone. The Warriors gone on to win three of the last four NBA titles and have a chance to secure their third-straight championship. All that winning has Myers feeling queasy.
“If I’m being honest, it feels more comfortable when we weren’t good,” Myers said. “This is a little uncomfortable for me. I don’t know how to do this. This is too much. This is gluttony man, I don’t know what this is.”
Myers attributed the Warriors’ bend-but-not-breakability to their personalities they have. He recounted meeting Shaun Livingston the day after signing him to a three-year deal, and Livingston asking before anything else, “What can I do to help the team?”
That sort of selflessness, and having the luck of finding players who not only fit, but can work out issues and congeal in the long term – from training staff up through the front office – is something Myers said is the hardest part of developing a team, and is the reason for the Warriors’ sustained success.
