Kirk Lacob has been a part of the Golden State Warriors front office for over a decade, joining the organization in 2010 when his father, Joe Lacob, and Peter Guber bought the team. He joined fresh out of college and has made an ascension through the front office in the year since; Lacob is now the executive vice president of basketball operations.
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While Lacob is well-positioned to one day take over the franchise, he has a hand in the operations already as one of team president Bob Myers’ highest-ranking deputies.
Lacob took some time recently to discuss his career, how Steve Kerr blocked his entryway into the NBA and the team’s player development ethos during a conversation with The Athletic as part of its 40 under 40 series.
You made your way up the org chart since 2010 when you first entered the organization. I was just wondering what do you you think you learned about the NBA and working for a team that maybe you weren’t expecting when you first entered the league?
It’s a weird thing. Coming out of college and going to any job, you probably shouldn’t know that much about it. I would argue whether it’s the NBA or anything else, you might think you know, and you go to school and maybe try to learn a specific thing. The NBA, we all assume we know a lot about it. It’s basketball. We watch it. And I studied, growing up, wanting to be in sports business. It was something I was passionate about. I figured I wasn’t going to play. I realized that at a somewhat reasonably early age. But I want to be involved, so even in high school, I was taking courses outside of my school, going to professors at local colleges who had backgrounds. I got connected to a guy named George Foster, Stanford Business School, and I did an independent study with him and read a book that he did — like a coursebook — with Bill Walsh. So even at a pretty early age, I was very much in tune with this. And I obviously had a lot of, I would say, really fortunate connections to people in the sports world who I could talk to and learn things from.
That all being said, you never really know what you’re walking into until you’re there and you’re experiencing it yourself. I was probably as ready for it at 21 years old as you could have been and a lot of things were not a surprise to me. But I think the things that that really jumped out to me were, one, it’s a really small world. I think a lot of businesses end up feeling this way, a lot of industries. But I found out how small a world it was pretty quickly. Just how important relationships are and will continue to be for your entire career. I laugh about this all the time because it’s somehow been basically 12 years but there are people I met my first year in the league who are now in, like, really high-up positions. I remember thinking when I was having conversations with people when I was in college trying to think about how should I go to work and there were certain people who treated me great and certain people who didn’t treat me all that well. And I remember thinking if I’m never on the other side I want to treat people well because you never know what sort of position they’re going to be in.
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I remember thinking that one day I want to be really successful and I’m going to remember the people who treated me well and the people who didn’t. I’ve grown up since then and realized it’s not a personal thing. But that’s very, very noticeable to me having been in the league for 12 years. Like people move up, they become in powerful positions. You have to do business with them. It’s just not worth treating people like shit, and it’s not worth trying to leverage somebody for no reason. So relationships are incredibly important.
And then I think the last thing that I probably have learned a lot is just things change. And often pretty quickly. The league I came into 12 years ago is way different than the league today. And the league in three years will be significantly different than it is today. When I started — I mean, I almost sound like an old guy now — but I started we, the Warriors at least, and they might have been behind the times a little bit but not super far, we had a head trainer and assistant trainer. And we had I think it was five total coaches and one video guy. And the video person was still using tapes, I believe, to record games and then put it onto a computer. Now, that was kind of a new thing. You know basketball front office, ours was like four people. Maybe it was six if you included a couple of scouts. Now we’ve just we’ve grown so much.
The amount of resources pouring in on all levels there. There was no analytics department when I got here. It’s that sort of thing. So that’s my long-winded third point, which is just things change. They change quickly and they will continue to change forever and ever. And you got to continue to be on top of it. You got to be willing to change with the times. You got to be forward-thinking. You got to see what’s coming next. So those are kind of the main things I’ve learned being in the NBA over the last 12 years.
I didn’t even know this, but you mentioned you were studying for the NBA and to work in the NBA. Do you think you would have still pursued a career in the league even if your father had not bought the Warriors in 2010?
I sure would have tried. I was very aware of how hard it is to get into the NBA. Before we bought the team — the timing is unbelievable. I’m incredibly fortunate. I had literally just graduated college when we bought the team that summer. In my senior year, I had gotten in touch with and interviewed with Steve Kerr, who was the GM of the Suns at the time, and I had actually been offered an internship with the Suns for the next year in the video room. So I was planning on doing that and I was so pumped. I was like ‘I’m gonna get a chance to be in the NBA. I’m gonna prove everyone, I’m gonna move up. Blah, blah, blah.’ And then he resigned. It was May and because I was on a quarter system, I obviously hadn’t started yet. I was gonna finish school there in June. So he called me and said, ‘I’m really sorry, but you’re not gonna be able to do this internship because I’m leaving and I doubt the new person is gonna want an intern who hasn’t started yet’. I said, ‘No, Steve, I get it. This is how life works. It was an amazing opportunity. And now I don’t have it and I’ll look for the next one.’
Little did I know foreshadowing that like a month later we would start the process trying to buy the team. A few months later we’d actually buy the team and then my dad would convince me that I should come work for my favorite team in my favorite sport, like a dream job sort of scenario. But no, I thought like to be quite frank, yeah, I wanted to be on the sports side of things. I would have been super happy working in the NFL, MLB. I would have been really happy working on the business side of the sport primarily. I still do a lot of that today and it’s why I love my job so much. But I definitely did not foresee what ended up happening. I did not foresee it being a possibility. And I was fully prepared to give sports a go for a couple years. And then have it not work out and go into the tech world, which was like kind of my other love growing up. I grew up in Silicon Valley. So yeah, it’s kind of have no choice but to be involved in that.
Photo of Kirk Lacob: Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty ImagesHave you gotten your revenge yet on Steve for leaving when he did?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we hired him, whatever it was, five years later. We hired him as a coach, which is a lot harder than my job. Yeah, definitely, exactly, revenge. No, it is a funny kind of this is how life is sometimes. One of those funny circuitous things. Five years after that we were hiring a coach and we had some connections to Steve and I was like, oh, Steve almost hired me at one time. Yeah, return the favor and actually hire him. It’s been a great, great relationship.
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You started in player development, whether it was with Santa Cruz and then that seemed to be like a focal point of yours during your career. Obviously, you guys have several high-profile young players now. Is it refreshing to have player development be like this integral part of the organization again in a way that it seems like you know for obvious reasons it wasn’t during the dynasty days.
Every team goes through life cycles, obviously. And in reality, we always felt player development was important, even when we had a lot of vets and not a lot of young guys, but it was a different form of player development. Like we really view player development as, how can you make a player the best version of themselves? Now, the most growth obviously comes when they’re younger, but there’s a lot of growth that can happen to players who are more veteran. We’ve seen it with Andrew Wiggins the last couple years. The growth he’s taken in kind of the middle part of his career. Even as guys get towards the end of their career sometimes, you see something really changed in their game, the way they play. And then the other part of player development that we don’t talk a lot about, because it’s not as sexy and interesting, is there’s a lot of off-court stuff that goes into this. To be a great athlete you kind of have to ultimately have your life together off the court. We’ve seen so many times where this trips players up or it gets in the way and they go through a slump.
A lot of what I did early on was about helping players get what they needed off the court so that they could perform on the court. The best part about it is I had a lot of this early on, and it was a lot of times felt like you know the one person trying to grab a bunch of other people from other departments and help them create a vision. Now we’ve got really a large department. We’ve got someone on the coaching staff who is solely kind of dedicated as the director of player development and their job is to make sure players have development courses at every part of their career, and that the coaching staff is on the same kind of alignment as the performance team because that’s a whole other player element is your physical performance. On the front office side, we’ve got a whole group and we call them team development, but part of team development is player development. And we have a whole silo kind of associated to that.
So yeah, it is refreshing and fun to see where it’s come from. I remember when I first started doing some player-development stuff with the league and I remember them giving us feedback after my first year doing it and they were like, ‘Yeah, you guys were the best player development this year.’ And I sat there in shock and I was like, ‘That’s impossible. We’re terrible at it.’ Like, ‘If you’re telling me this is best in the league like this is awful.’ As somebody who is at this point that 23 years old, who’s been in the league for two years like you cannot tell me this is good enough. We’re not doing enough if we’re the best. So it’s been really cool to see.
One last thing. I read that you’re still out there playing in local leagues. So which Warriors player would you compare your game to?
Well, my game has deteriorated a lot over the years. We used to play a ton of pickup here. Like, four days a week of fives. I used to play a couple mornings a week and a couple of evenings in local leagues, and we’d have this game in San Quentin. I used to go — I think it was every, or every other Saturday, or once a month Saturday — and then we have the big Warriors game once a year. I certainly don’t play as much anymore. A lot of my athleticism has left me and injuries have caught up and now I have kids and it’s really hard. But I still try to. Long answer to your question, whose game do I resemble? It totally depends on the setup. There are times when I am like the Andre Iguodala. Like, I’m there to like get everything connected and play kind of cerebral defensive all over the floor, shut a guy down with kind of like veteran guile, and there there are games where I’ve got to be a primary shot guy.
Those are definitely fewer and further between nowadays, but I had a good game a couple months ago where it felt like that way. So I don’t know. That’s a hard question to answer. And the reality is in any situation, you’re asking me to compare myself to NBA players, and I have played on the court with many of these guys. And I can tell you, I shouldn’t compare myself to them. Although the funny thing is, you know, for me, I’m competitive. And I’m confident in my abilities. A lot of the times I’ll play with these NBA guys and I’ll be like, you know, I know they’re a lot better than me, but I’m not out of place; like I can be on the court with these guys. Unfortunately, I’ve been on the court with some of our star players before and I definitely felt like I shouldn’t be on the court. Like with Steph and Klay — I’ve guarded Klay before in pickup games. I legitimately felt worthless. I was like, ‘there’s no reason I should be here doing what I’m doing.’ And then I’ll go against other guys who are good players and I will be like, ‘I can do a little bit,’ but against a guy like Klay it’s like I have zero chance and I just feel awful even trying.
(Photo of Kirk Lacob and Steve Kerr: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
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