Unless some actual news arises out of this Joe Lacob thing, I swear I’m done talking about it. Well, except for this week in review story I wrote late last night for SB Nation Bay Area, where I list five Bay Area owners throughout history who’ve also been knocked for something they said (or texted).
My final word: Lacob’s better than Chris Cohan in many, many ways, but he didn’t realize just how fed up Warriors fans are. The way the team self-destructed after reaching the playoffs in 2007 was more frustrating than all those years of Carlesimo/St. Jean/Cowens/Winters/Musselman/Montgomery futility combined. For Lacob and the gloriously out-of-the-fray Peter Guber, this was supposed to be a nice honeymoon.
But instead of enjoying their status as saviors, they’ve had to deal with an impending labor stoppage, the constant threat of Larry Ellison barging in and screwing things up, a mediocre basketball team and fans whose frustrations were probably underestimated by Lacob. The overwhelming consensus around the country was that Warriors fans were some sort of oddity: a sizable, vocal group of painfully loyal people who’d never make a stink as long as the product on the floor was semi-entertaining. Like rooting for the Warriors meant you were on the equivalent of basketball Prozac.
I think Lacob’s frustration, compounded by lousy play since the All-Star Break, has been growing. And that frustration boiled over in a moment when he was probably in a large room with a group of people hanging on his every word. No big deal. Eddie Debartolo’s first general manager was Joe Thomas. Mistakes are made by everyone, especially owners brand new to what has become a very public job, as Lacob said yesterday in his KNBR interview. As long as from here on out, Lacob shows through his wallet (not his words) that he’ll do whatever it takes to make the Warriors a perennial contender, this will just be a cute little bump in the road along the way.