Warriors GM Bob Myers recounts free agency madness and getting swept up by a gay pride parade
"This free agency was like a stock broker on the floor," said Warriors GM Bob Myers. "That's how crazy that was."
Labor Day is upon us, and you know what that means.
Barbecues, the last chance to rock those Bermuda shorts, and the hide-bound “What I did over summer vacation” essay.
Might as well forget the last one. Warriors general manager Bob Myers has all y’all beat.
For starters, he looked on in horror as the Warriors suffered catastrophic injuries in the NBA Finals that dashed their best chances for a three-peat.
“July was kind of hectic,” Myers said Tuesday during an appearance on the Joe, Lo and Dibs show on 95.7 The Game. “The good news, our sport, unlike baseball where free agency just drags and drags, we’re done fast. It’s kind of too fast from where I sit. Very quickly, we saw most of the team go away.”
Myers’ most important order of business was to fly to New York to see what Kevin Durant was thinking.
Durant, of course, was thinking he would like to sign with Brooklyn.
“That was crazy,” Myers said. “I’d flown out. That day I saw Kevin. I left after we talked for a couple hours. We talked about a lot of things. I left.”
And turned into the accidental tourist.
“There was a gay pride parade in New York City,” Myers said. “I didn’t know where I was. I kind of got caught up in the parade. Someone in the parade said, ‘You don’t want to be here.’ I said, ‘I’ve got no problem with the parade, I’ve just got to work.
“I’m trying to call Joe (Lacob) and say, ‘Hey, he’s not coming back. What are we going to do?’ I couldn’t hear anything. I was in Greenwich Village. So I found an area and I called Joe.”
Myers managed to re-sign Kevon Looney amid the madness. He also asked Durant if he could grease the skids for a sign-and-trade agreement between the Warriors and Brooklyn.
“We’ll figure out something,” he said Durant told him.
“I didn’t know we’d have to figure it out that night,” Myers said of the deal that resulted in D’Angelo Russell joining the Warriors. “I was in New York City. I didn’t get to bed until about 4 in the morning. But the crazy thing was, the whole league was still working.
“This free agency was like a stock broker on the floor. That’s how crazy that was.”