One of the NBA’s more outspoken owners was at it again this week.
Golden State Warriors majority owner Joe Lacob took a thinly-veiled shot at the division rival Los Angeles Lakers with some comments in an interview with The Athletic’s Tim Kawakami. Lacob spoke about Golden State’s team-building strategy of filling out an older core of Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green with younger complementary players such as Jordan Poole, Andrew Wiggins, and Gary Payton II.
“There are a couple teams, I’m not going to say who, there’s some other teams that went all-in on older players,” said Lacob. “And older players do get injured. That’s the thing you have to remember. Suppose we had made a trade, traded away all our youth, for I don’t know, you name the guy, and they’re injured, out for the year. Anytime you’re over 30, 32, 35, these people get injured. It’s data.”
Lacob, who has owned the Warriors since 2010, shares some other thoughts on the team’s current playoff run as well as their future outlook in the interview with Kawakami. You can read it in full here.
It is not hard to tell that Lacob was shading at the Lakers for going all-in on older guys. They stacked age on age by acquiring Russell Westbrook, Dwight Howard, Carmelo Anthony, and other geezers to go with the LeBron James-Anthony Davis core. Most of those acquisitions bombed, and the Lakers ended up missing a 20-team postseason due to injuries and dysfunction.
As for the Warriors, Poole, Wiggins, and Payton all ended up being massive contributors to a team that won 53 games in spite of Curry, Thompson, and Green all having various injury absences. That does not even account for 21-and-under players Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody, and James Wiseman, all of whom figure to be solid NBA players in the coming years.
Lacob, meanwhile, is obviously no fan of the Lakers, who were on top of the NBA when he bought the Warriors in 2010. Lacob even recently threw a jab at one of the Lakers’ stars. In addition to the three rings his team has won during his tenure as opposed to the Lakers’ one, Lacob clearly thinks the Warriors have a leg up on the Lakers when it comes to team-building too.
