In part two of an interview with Nate Duncan of Basketball Insiders (part one was released yesterday), Warriors GM Bob Myers discussed the decision-making that led to the current Warriors roster, the team’s solid performance this season, and their championship window. The whole thing is an interesting read, and here are some of the highlights:
On Andrew Bogut‘s three-year extension, which is one of just two non-rookie extensions to be signed under the new CBA:
“In this day and age in a new CBA, a player that’s playing well likely will opt to wait because they can add years. Had he waited until this summer, he can get a five-year deal. The way that we structured it in the extension, all we have to give are those three years. From the player’s side, a lot of players don’t want to come to the table and discuss the extension because they’re forfeiting money in the future. But Andrew understood that this is a place he wanted to be, and he obviously wanted to get a fair deal. I felt like we offered a fair deal, obviously he did too because he accepted it.
…there are always variables that play into it. Some financial, some situational; injury plays into it to some extent, age plays into it, whether that player feels like he can get another deal, happiness, how happy is the player in that market, on that team with his coach and his front office. A lot of things have to line up and that’s why I think you see few of those types of deals.”
Going to the Andre Iguodala sign-and-trade, at what point did the thought of opening up the cap space over last summer kind of come into focus for you guys?
What started as a seed from our side in the situation, we felt like this would be a great guy to add to our roster, was cemented when we met with him and he echoed the same sentiments. From that point on, it was full steam ahead to try to find a way to do it. Even after that, though, my personal belief was that it remained a long shot. Just because we wanted to do it and he wanted to do it, that was nice and made us feel good about it, but you’d still put low odds on it – less than five percent. We had to find multiple trading partners taking a lot of money; it had to fit what they were trying to do. It really came down to the last 30 minutes, where his agent had said to us, ‘Look I’ll let you guys try and try and try, but you have a deadline now.’ He was very fair about it. So that really came down to the wire, and fortunately for us the league is comprised of 29 other teams and if you’re really motivated to do a deal, you can usually find a partner – sometimes you can’t and thankfully we did. I think it fit what Utah was looking to do, and it all lined up.
On the possibility of further moves:
We feel like we’re going to give this core and these players a healthy amount of time to see if it works. We also believe that we maintain now and believe in the future a healthy amount of assets on our roster. We’re very attractive, we have a lot of talent. It allows you to have flexibility should you want to make moves.