Bob Myers Discusses the Golden State Warriors 2021 Draft Class

sorry i thought i might get out here [Music] earlier but we were trying to maybe buy buy a late pick we didn't we didn't get it done um the draft was obviously you saw it so it was um never goes like you think we were happy with what we ended up doing the part of the draft that i'll remember is the um how they honored terence clark i thought that was very high class by the nba a sad a sad moment so that was obviously after we picked between the lottery and the rest of the picks but happy to answer any questions um about the guys we selected we're happy and um ready for free agency now in 72 hours or whatever it is hey bob what's happening um you guys uh picked a prospect that is pretty raw he's obviously talented but pretty raw and someone that you would have to develop and you picked him at a time when you have guys that like steph and like draymond and like clay who want to win now so how do you accomplish winning now and being a contender while trying to develop somebody to be on a contender right now yeah hopefully winning now is what we want to do what they want to do we'll see if these guys can help us obviously we have to add through free agency we have to hope the guys on the team that are in the rotation that are a little bit younger and some new we have guys we think played well at the end of last year that hopefully can help us but we're going to have to get some older guys we hope and free agency and see if we can get minutes out of these guys picking older players doesn't necessarily mean they can play right away talking to draymond he was pretty accomplished player in college i think his big ten player of the year obviously a senior and he didn't really even play his uh rookie year not much at least so old is is often good but doesn't necessarily mean you're ready to go so we went with the guys we thought were best and if they can play now great they can play in the middle of the season at the end that's good too but we have to take the guys we think of the best players did you get any immediate feedback from those guys like draymond or steph or any of the the core guys that you have right now well draymond's in tokyo but i don't think he went to sleep so i talked to him many times and steph's not in this time zone either he's in a very different one and i don't know where clay is i think in la but uh i talked to steph last i think last night his time i think or the early morning his time wherever he's again very different time zone and draymond i talked to like at four in the morning in tokyo and five in the morning at six in the morning uh while we were picking he uh he texted me after the third or fourth pick and he said kaminga and i said we'll see if he's there so he's happy and then um at about the ninth pick he said moody and i said i don't think he's gonna be there and i didn't even give him those names so he gave me a big thumbs up but you know we still gotta that's that's good i'm glad he's supportive and appreciate that but um i still think and i think um we think we need to add some veterans that we're not done yet that's what we're going to have to do in free agency you've talked in the lead up about how you expected a lot of trade offers potentially coming in how how much were the trade talks prevalent when you were on the clock and how close were you to make a move the only things that were coming our way were mostly trade backs for future picks which i mean i'd say well we didn't have any trades for players that came about really rotation players are beyond starters so all the things we talked about were do you want to take your pick and trade it back and have a future for next year do you want to move back a few picks and get a second round pick or multiple second round picks so we got a lot of that kind of stuff but when we saw what we could get at seven we liked it we saw we could get a 14. we wanted to do that so we didn't really consider um any major things there wasn't really anything on the table as far as moving them for a player um like i said we could have probably moved them back but we liked the guys we liked and decided to take them bob when you're considering kaminga do you have to have a good sense of what you're going to get at 14 like do you need to know we can get a guy that isn't going to be a developmental player at 14. we thought well we didn't weren't sure but the list we had lined up that we were we had a few guys at 14 that we thought were kind of like moody um that were more kind of guys that could play off the ball played in a system um shooters we wanted to try to get some shooting and so there's a few guys we were looking at there and he happened to be the highest of those guys and he was there so we took him and i think he we even considered him at seven at one point earlier in the process not thinking kaminga would be there um and we had him in twice we had him in once where he did not work out against other players and then in that workout that i think was publicized we brought him back and had him compete and also saw obviously we had some people see him in college and we interviewed him in chicago so we actually got to see him three times and talk to him and just his composure and his kind of readiness a few of our development coaches thought he was when we got done some of the coaches don't kind of know the players like we do and we said what'd you think of moody and they said well he is he a junior or a senior he said he's pretty young you'll think the same thing when you talk to him just got kind of an old old soul about him but that's not why we like them for a lot of reasons he's he's um great size great length and has a good skill and good feel for the game bob what is it that you like about kaminga other way over here hey oh sorry um upside talent position i mean we looked at the free agent wings there's none of them i mean it's possible to get wings in the nba now because multiple position players it's really tough guys that can you watch the playoffs it's you know one big guy and four guys that can pass shoot defend seems to be the way our league's going threes have become fours and you want guys that can slide down position and slide up and so we like the optionality of these two guys but kaminga certainly represents somebody that we thought on film he passed better than we might have initially thought um he's got a great story about him pretty mature kid for what he went through and kind of came over the country at a young age and um you know his aggressiveness his competitiveness his work ethic all these guys we draft if they don't work or want to compete they probably won't won't make it and so we think that if you can grab a guy like that and put him in our system we've got something really good but we have to work and he has to work to make the whole thing good for all of us uh what are the expectations for kamingo early on and might he see any time in the g league and what exactly does that process look like well first we got to get him out here and see if he can get him and these guys haven't played in so long i mean a lot of the agents wisely don't let their players compete because they don't want to get hurt uh so we i talked to our trainer and said do you think these guys can be ready for we got a summer league in sacramento and vegas we don't want them to get hurt so we got to see what kind of conditioning they have we did they look in pretty good shape we've worked them both out but i don't know the answer to that question um trying to think of how you know if a player sometimes you're surprised sometimes you're surprised in a good way sometimes you realize you know this guy's just not ready um i don't know what his timeline is going to be i think all the above could be guy can play right now if clay's not ready to start the season and one of these guys shows they can play fine i don't know which one um so it's hard to say i think in training camp we might have a much better idea i mean we really need to have that time we need to have a summer league when you get feedback we need to see kind of what steve wants to do talk to him this morning well his morning in tokyo he's excited but i don't really want to predict what they're going to look like yet it's hard to say bob how did your visit with kaminga go in miami was there anything about his workout or the interview that kind of surprised you let me think about that i you know when we went it was the idea was we we better go do this just in case he's there to be honest we just were thinking he wouldn't be but we all a lot of us went to miami uh joe we flew there with him and and kirk laker and myself and larry harris and mike dunleavy and um it was we even brought kenny atkinson one of our new coaches with us so he got on the floor with him and it was nice to have a guy like that because steve couldn't be here to get on the floor with him a little bit because kenny has a great background as we you should know and everybody knows in player development and we said what do you want to see out of him and he said i want to see how he reacts to pressure i want to see how he protects the rim so he put him in a couple drills that kenny said i'd like you to do this and and he handled him well he was conversive he he worked hard it was a long workout he didn't really break i'm always impressed uh post-workout when a player will come to dinner by himself his representative we had two tables and it was myself joe and kirk and one of our scouts reggie rankin was at one table and you know it's you know i'm i'm how many years older than him he's 18 so i'm a lot older than him it's hard for an 18 year old to sit there and answer questions uh from an mba owner gm scouts um he handled himself really well he was talking about his parents coming to town he's excited seen his parents in five years so we got to kind of talk to him about growing up in africa and how many languages he speaks he speaks four languages which is always impressive for somebody that's like me that speaks one so just his nature we asked him who he admired we asked him what he wanted to be uh really nice kid and you guys will get to know him but all the whole package right the whole thing was nice his brother actually came and worked out for us on sunday his brother's kind of been his father figure while he's been in the u.s and his brother was in that workout on sunday with us and it's important now when you draft somebody that age even any young player it's you have to surround him with kind of support so i saw that he had that and you know overall you have to feel good about it but he's he's a really kid that wants to be great and looks like he'll work hard front here obviously the roster's still coming together and you've got to figure out what you would do in free agency and things can change certainly during the season but given the way the picks were made tonight and the ross is coming together at the moment do you think championship contention is a reasonable expectation going into next season i think that's mostly on clay what he can be not on him but that question with a healthy clay thompson i think we're right there with everybody but i don't know if when how i expect them to come back healthy i don't want to put any pressure on the date because it's not going to be at the start of the season it's not gonna be the first game but really we need one of our top two three players to be one of our top two or three players and that will determine i think if you put our healthy warriors team against our competition looking at the league right now obviously you see things change uh and maybe we'll see more change in the next three four five days but um with our core of the three guys and wiggins and having looney and wiseman and poole and all these juan and eric all the guys damien and everybody that is in our rotation yeah if we're healthy and maybe one of these young guys gives us more than we thought yeah i mean i i think in the playoffs as you know nick you look at this past playoffs look at any past playoffs it's 40 minutes for curry 40 minutes for green 40 minutes for tom this is even when we were in the finals wiggins played huge minutes so we're gonna need some help we're gonna have to get to the playoffs obviously we didn't get there last two years but with a healthy team heading to the playoffs yeah i don't see a team where we look at and say we can't beat them doesn't mean we will um and we gotta add veterans so to answer your question today no we need to add a couple guys not we need some we need some veterans i don't know who that'll be um we gotta find out if we can win a tie if we offer somebody something how do they feel about us like i said last year i think we were close on some guys but they clay's injury i don't blame the players they said look we're gonna go somewhere else you know i've asked steph and you know our guys to give input on what they think we need and um you know hopefully we'll get some guys and we've been successful with that in the past but we're gonna have to get some guys to come that they can actually step in and give us some minutes bob two-part question one um in talking to people in recent weeks about kamenga they all liked him a lot and thought he had a bright future but they all seem to struggle in finding an identifiable nba skill that he has right now have you guys been able to identify such a skill and other part of the question is can you visualize opening the season with two rookies and wise men all on your active roster yeah we'll see if they'll be active or not i mean i imagine i gotta look and see who else we sign i mean they may change the rules where we get 15 active guys i don't know if that's actually happened but they're talking about that i think the question is are they going to be in the rotation can we expect anything from any of them if you get something from all of them that's great if you get something from two of them good one of them um where would we need the minutes where can they give us minutes um it's going to be answered hopefully they're all healthy in training camp and we can see what they can do but otherwise there's going to have to be minutes like i said to nick we're going to need some veterans to come in here and play um and with that it's you know i'm guessing a little bit like you guys but there's still work to be done and and you know clay is a part when when's he back how many games can he play all those things and how we going to play i know steve's got ideas on playing you know we played small for a little bit at the end of the last season do we want to go that way so i think we really need some time you know these guys need some time uh i thought last year we made some steps i think we ended the last season with so much uncertainty we've got a little bit more but i think um with a healthy group going to training camp hopefully we can figure some of this out oh on kaminga you know i think the kaminga part was guys do this in the draft they do this i think is that his skill um would be that at his size ball handling um getting to the rim attacking the paint a lot of the coaches described it as the ability to get downhill meaning that when you play there's a force to what he does as far as his ability to get in the paint and score and put pressure on the defense and you can put pressure on the defense a lot of different ways shooting he does it at the rim and with his size and skill there's players in our league that have that ability to kind of use their size uses athleticism and strength and for somebody to be the kind of have the frame that he does at his age i think that'll get more and more um his shot needs work i think so does moody sort of a lot of players in the nba but what we liked was his aggressiveness if you go back and watch him play he it's a mindset somebody talked about he needs to get better shooting we agree he agrees but he shoots meaning he'll take a lot of threes and that's a skill too if you look at some of the players in the nba the thread of the three is a value as opposed to a player that won't shoot a three and you don't have to guard him so we looked at that as a willingness to shoot as a confidence to shoot as a work ethic thing so that's how we looked at it but yeah if you you could look at certain players and say he can do this one thing we think he has the ability to do a lot of things but he has to work on it and get better you mentioned kenny atkinson earlier uh you guys kind of overhauled your player development staff uh this summer what do you want to see out of that staff what do you think what do you think it was maybe a week needless to last year and how much pressure's on them i don't know if it was a weakness last year was not f it's not i'm not going to criticize anybody working in last year was kind of nuts with covet and everything in the season not knowing we're going to start and not knowing practice times and not knowing a lot so i think we were all kind of on our heels as opposed to this year where even in the draft kenny's up there jama's up there right after we made the pick they're huddling with some of our scouts what do you see in this guy jama did some of the workouts kenny flew to see kaminga like this is a whole different level of engagement not to fall where we were before but yeah we've certainly kind of ramped up that process when these guys get out here tomorrow they're going to do their press conference they're going to sit with both of those guys and go over a whole plan um that's the that's the nba now that's that's how that's how it has to be we have to be in the player development plan if you're going to be picking where we're picking you have to do it jama who we hired from toronto has a great pedigree with it if you look at what toronto has done with our young players they've done a tremendous job he's been a big part of that we interviewed him he often mentioned guys on their team i can't say their names because i'm not allowed but you know who they are and what he was able to do with them we really value that they're probably still up there now talking about it and they're excited about it and yeah so it's it's a newness it's a freshness not that it was bad before but i think it's a renewed focus and um i think it's going to help us it's going to help our players well i got two questions i'll ask the first one and then ask the second one after you answer it's not to be confusing i know it's a little sensitive to talk about a future post curry post clay post stream on whatever that is but joe's brought it up a little that you do have to think about it is it fair to start imagining a future with wiseman kaminga moody do you have to start sort of thinking about that yeah i mean we you know yeah you have to um we also know we want to win again so it's not binary right it's not one or the other i know it may look away or however you want to portray it is fine we have to look at what our options are and make a choice and tonight see these are the best choices this was the best option sometimes you weigh it against opportunities sometimes they're there sometimes they're not so we have to view it as if this is what's here today this is what we're doing we think about the present we think about the future i mean you're you're seeing players play a lot longer in every sport we hope our guys like steph clan draymond could play a lot longer it seems to be that certain players can and it also seems to be that 20 21 20 you guys watch there's 20 year olds 21 year old 22 year olds that are playing a lot of minutes in meaningful games the league is by that time these some of these guys are third year in the league second year in the league it depends on who it is so you know that's kind of how we we view it and then if it's not going that way we adjust you know you deal with it you deal with situations the hardest thing for me i think has been not knowing what our team is and again it may look like an excuse it's not we need to see our team with klay thompson and there's no other way to say it then we'll know what our team is i know what our team was like when we had him before when he was before he was hurt that's how important he is there's a reason why he matters so much because he's so good until we have him back on our team we did the wiggins deal to play with klay thompson nobody's fault certainly not clay's nobody's fault but we didn't get to see clay last year we got to see what our team looks like we have to find out those answers to answer the questions that you just asked which is where are we going where is it heading that's the most important part yeah the rookies are part of it sure the veterans we sign that's part of it but it's really about what is a what is it what does this warriors team look like when we're healthy that's what i would like to know and i think everybody like to know and whether it was tonight or earlier this week or even over the last few weeks was there ever any traction on any big trade that you might have explored or someone called you about did you ever feel like you had motion towards it in was kaminga's name ever brought up by other teams saying if if this is the player i know you didn't you're gonna say you didn't draft them to trade them and i'm sure you didn't but is it a trade asset that you're still other teams might have in mind i don't know because we didn't we didn't answer we didn't talk about take this guy and we like this we didn't do any of that and in truth we were mostly just focused on the draft we didn't have any big discussions obviously you talked i talked to probably every team in the league about a lot of different things but to your question of traction not really nothing kind of close i mean there was obviously much is discussed and you glanced at certain things but nothing nothing got passed into the red zone past the 50-yard line so to speak so focused on the draft aware of if opportunities came up we'd look at them and that's what we'll do in uh free agency so we'll do it's our job we're always doing that but over the last few weeks it's mostly but it's been focusing on the draft bob you've been through this free agency thing before with not much money to spend how confident do you feel in your chance to get some of the players you want with the limited resources and is the sun and trade uh is that on the table or is that taking off because of the luxury tax i think it's out signing trade because we're we're past the hard cap kind of like way past it so to sign and trade a player we can sign a trade and send a player out which is not really what you were asking we can't take one in but we can send one out if we want that is what i was asking okay okay yeah we we can send a player out but we can't take a player back because of the hard cap with apron our salary is way way past it um so your question of how hard it's going to be to get players i don't know it's an interesting market there's not a lot of teams with cap space some teams use their mid-level some teams don't sometimes use the taxpayer we'll we'll be a little more selective you our payroll is crazy it's huge so we want to be smart about it try to get players that matter now we have an idea of what we are even even i'll bring this gap i think we hope juan can give us minutes you know even knowing some more last year we didn't know that we didn't know what pool's going to be have some kind of idea of what we are and what damian lee certain guys that we think we can plug in and kind of know what we're well we know we got that but what do we need you know maybe we need to back up point guard now we didn't draft a point guard so it's curry and we'll see see what we do with nico manion we got to figure out is that a veteran do we need a veteran big we need a veteran wing i hope i mean i i do believe players want to come play for us players also want to make money so they're going to have to gauge that and we're always competitive but at the end of the day you know it has to break a certain way but i'm pretty confident we can get some guys

Channel: Golden State Warriors

Views: 89,838

Rating: 4.9131336 out of 5

Keywords: Golden State Warriors, Golden State, Warriors, GSW, Dubs, DubNation, Dub Nation

Id: CtyD22P06Yk

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sanchanabechan]

wasn’t 4am here… more like around 9:30-10:30am

[u/StrokeModsEgos]

"He needs to get better shooting, we agree, he agrees, but he shoots. Meaning he'll take a lot of 3s and that's a skill too. If you look at some of the players in the nba, the threat of the 3 is a value as opposed to a player that wont shoot a 3 and you dont have to guard him.."

Lol sounds like some jabs towards Ben Simmons.

Thank you Bob. At least I can sleep better at night knowing Ben Simmons isn't going to be traded to this team lol.

[u/Nghbrhd_slacker87]

Draymond Green... role as Associate GM has been confirmed! (Assistant to the assistant regional manager)

Devil's advocates will say Dray knows those guys draw the most trade package value. Nice draft day after either way.

Summer League is about to be LIT!!!! 😆😆😆

Lineup. Kuminga. Moody. Mannion. Jessup... and a few UDFAs. Low key I'd bet Kuminga bandwagon catches fire if he has a few good games in summer league. I'd be over the moon if dude just showed max effort on defense.

[u/Princeofcatpoop]

This implies that the 3rd and 8th pick were better than Kuminga and Moody respectively, in Dray's opinion.