Kirk Lacob “shocked” at how easily people believe “garbage”
[transcript]
Below the paywall is the long overdue full transcript of Kirk Lacob’s recent guest appearance on the Warriors Plus-Minus podcast with Tim Kawakami of the SF Standard and Marcus Thompson of The Athletic. The conversation lasted over an hour.
I had seven bullet points listed out for the whole pod covering various topics, but after re-checking all the stuff I actually transcribed and edited for clarity, context and NBA-correctness, I realized there was a massive amount spanning all those topics I wanted to highlight.
Therefore, I’ll have to split up all those subject matters into separate posts, even though the behemoth transcription is technically in this post (beneath the paywall).
Knowing there was potentially a mountain of information to share with you is mainly the reason why it’s taken me so long to at least post this subset from the Lacob pod.
I’ve also been super-busy with creating off-season videos talking about various roster moves the Warriors can make [playlist] — which involve a lot of spreadsheet work — as well as hosting Valkyries and NBA Playoffs watch parties.
It’d be great to see you on tonight’s Finals Game 1 live chat:
Fyi, every watch party, I take timestamped notes and then, after the live is done, I re-edit the Description into a quasi-recap, just in case you missed the game.
Anyways, the main topic I want to start with is when the conversation with Kirk veered into roster-building around a superstar and how hard that is, which then morphed into a quick rant about the “garbage” of NBA rumors out there.
But Kirk is right. In fact, just since my last post nearly two weeks ago, there have been a few “garbage” rumors:
Anfernee Simons or Collin Sexton are Non-Taxpayer Mid-Level Exception targets for the Warriors. I debunked this rumor because the only way to get below the luxury tax line is either to (a) renounce Kristaps Porzingis, which isn’t a fiscally responsible way to manage your salary slots, particularly when you are not a small-market team and you have a cash cow in Chase Center, which according to Sportico makes you the highest-valued NBA franchise on the planet, (b) or trade out Jimmy Butler or Draymond Green — the latter of which we can probably rule out with the return of Steve Kerr and the former of which would still leave you a couple million of the full $15 million mid-level short, that you would need to compete for names like Simons and Sexton. I should add that this is not a shot at Brett Siegel of ClutchPoints, who wrote that sources told him Simons and Sexton are targets for Golden State. There is nothing wrong with reporting what league sources told him at the NBA Draft Combine. In fact, that is his job: get sources and report what they tell you. It’s the resulting virality that turns a report into aggregated memes instantly accepted as fact, that is unfortunate, that’s all. It is social media content consumption without deeper context and the failure to put a weight on whether something is speculation versus information. This is all explained in this video:
Second garbage viral tweet: That amount that one Wardell Stephen Curry II signed with Li-Ning for was $1.9 billion. How many of you fell for that dollar figure? Lol. Good on Shams Charania of ESPN for finding out the real number was $400 million. But I’ve already seen one guy on Instagram, who makes Reels about finance, where he actually believed that the $1.9 billion figure could be true. I mean, look it up: the market capitalization of Li-Ning is “only” $6 billion. As such, Mr. Li Ning himself might not even be worth that $1.9 billion number, depending on how Chinese companies are typically structured before they go public. That being said, with Anta sitting at a market cap of nearly $30 billion — five times the size of Li-Ning — we will explore why Steph chose Li-Ning and not Anta, in a forthcoming post.
Hoops@HoopssStephen Curry reportedly will earn a MASSIVE $1.19 BILLION in his new 10-year contract with Li-Ning 😱 That is worth almost 4 TIMES more than what he earned in his 12-year contract with Under Armour 😳 This endorsement deal with Li-Ning is tied to brand revenue—meaning the
4:14 AM · Jun 2, 2026 · 1.39M Views460 Replies · 2.3K Reposts · 18.2K LikesThe third one is not a shot at Kawakami, but more so another indication of the failure of social media when it comes to speculation versus information. Kawakami wrote in a thought piece that he believed James to be a “live target” of the Warriors at, just like with Simons or Sexton, the Non-Taxpayer Mid-Level Exception. And just like with Simons or Sexton, I can tell you that the math results in our usage of that exception to be only at a maximum $13 million, even if we do go through with a potentially realistic salary-reduction move of trading two picks and Jimmy plus Brandin Podziemski to the LA Clippers for Kawhi Leonard. That puts the Warriors behind the eight-ball if there are other teams out there that can outbid LeBron at the full NTMLE of $15 million. However, given all this nitpicking, I do agree with Kawakami that LeBron is a “live target” — again, my problem is that people on social media take things to another level. It’s nuanced and hard to put in words. After all, I have already advocated signing-and-trading Porzingis for James, in multiple video essays that show you the math of the GSW cap sheets:
The Jaylen Brown three-team trade rumor: I’ve actually met NBA beat writer Sean Deveney of Heavy.com — back then at Oracle, he was with The Sporting News — and he’s a great guy and solid reporter. He wrote that the Warriors are in play should a three-team trade involve Giannis Antetokuonmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks and the Boston Celtics, who would need a salary slot like Brown’s to consummate the deal and probably are not trading the other salary slot that would work, Jayson Tatum. But Deveney did not write any further than that. There is no proposed trade, no trade machine scenario, zero additional reporting from sources. And that’s fine. He’s doing his job, which is to take what he knows about the NBA and write it into a story. And there’s no doubt that Joe Lacob would instruct Mike Dunleavy, Jr. to call in to both teams should the Celtics indeed go for Giannis, among GM circles. While there haven't been actual trade scenarios discussed, most people believe that the Bucks would not want to deal with Brown’s huge forthcoming extension and therefore Golden State could enter the picture as a landing spot, with those future draft picks in play. The Deveney article blurb is merely just one sentence of a surface-level speculation and written innocuously. But you know how aggregators are. They’ll find any little morsel, blow it up like a news report, and tag the author of the article as if it give it the stamp of approval that it is an actual trade, that actual NBA general managers are considering in this very moment. As of this writing, there is no credible information that the Celtics are considering moving Brown. People are just connecting gossip-y dots of words Jaylen chose on a recent Twitch livestream — please go look it up and ask AI, you can confirm this yourself. Aggregators love to aggregate morsels of speculation and trick you into believing it as news. I would not even be surprised if the kids that run these aggregator accounts are not even aware that that is what is happening. They just do it, they have been doing it since their first tweet, and people on Twitter love consuming it, so there is an addiction to the process where everybody can’t even remember how it all started.
Per Kirk Lacob:
There is an unbelievable amount of noise in the NBA media sphere right now. There always has been and I get why there is. I don’t have a problem with it, but, man, is there a lot of garbage out there these days and I feel bad for the people who, like, their names are involved in it, whether you’re the GM or the player involved and I get why people like this stuff too. But, like, there is a lot of garbage out there and I’m like kinda shocked at how easily people believe this and how easily people spread it these days. And it’s not like an attack on, like, you bringing it up or anything like that.
…I’m just like kind of amazed. Like, there are a lot of insiders out there who don’t know anybody and they just spread rumors. And there’s, I guess, nothing inherently wrong with that. It just doesn’t feel right. But, look, I get stuff all the time. People send me stuff all the time, whether it’s, frankly, friends of mine or text messages or Instagram or Twitter, whatever. I get stuff all the time where people are like, “So-and-so said this. How can you guys not be looking? You’re an idiot.” But I’m just, like, where are people getting this information? And I get that this is big business and people love it, but there is just so much out there that is so false and there’s a lot — there are some people who are really bad about it. They will spread anything you might call it, like clickbait. It’s gotten really bad. I don’t think it really affects our business in a major way and, again, I don’t care that much. I’m just surprised by it, how easily people fall for this stuff sometimes.
There’s even a joke about his dad further in the convo, see more of this transcript below.
Again, like Lacob says, it’s not the original report that I am calling garbage. It is the resultant culture of creating a meme with an eye-pleasing jersey swap or large headline with the player in question against a dark backdrop, that catches your attention. It’s preying on the social media addiction. It happens.
I want to repeat: we need guys like Siegel and Kawakami and Deveney. Aggregators hungry for clicks? No. Then again, I do use aggregators for, well, aggregation of news plus as notifiers of breaking news and perhaps obscure topics from podcasts that you would otherwise not have the time of day to keep track of.
So, okay, aggregators, you can stay. But I’ll keep warning the average fan of how often you step out of bounds.
In fact, this is why I created our LetsGoWarriors Discord server (a good portion of which is free), to lower the entropy that aggregators create and to organize the mess they cause, turn all that into source-based news and information with searchable excerpts that point to exactly which reporters said what.
But as far as trade rumors, if you just sit down with some spreadsheets and actually try to do some math and balance some books of respective teams to ensure they are below the luxury tax line, the first apron, and the second apron, depending on their circumstances, you can easily tell how realistic it is for Player X to land with Team Y.
Here are the relevant excerpts from Kirk, Tim and Marcus. The entire 1-hour transcript (well, most of it) is under the paywall 👇
Unfortunately, I did not keep track of speakers, but generally speaking you can tell when it’s Lacob talking:
22:17 You’re in with this roster, right? I mean, obviously, the financial constraints are what they are, but as you look at this, I’m in Oklahoma City for Game 1 of Spurs-Thunder and these look like the two powers, right? Of the West. And there’s a very clear, like, contrasting style of play to how the Warriors have played. Do you still feel like, obviously with some amendments and some tweaks, that the way Steph and Draymond and Steve has built it is viable against that, maybe even a great counter to it? Or do you kind of got to get more the five-out athletes everywhere, everybody shoots, the skinny big guy, all that?
22:39 I think there’s a lot of different ways to win basketball. That’s always been my philosophy. I think you build your team around your best player. Like, that’s — your best player is usually really unique. The best players in the world and the league are unique and you need to build a style around them. I think we’ve seen a copycat sort of situation in the NBA for as long as I can remember. You see a team win and you say, “We need to, we need to — That’s what’s next.” And that was us for a while, right?
22:53 This is them copying you, right?
22:54 Right. I mean, but I remember talking to teams. We need to find the next Steph Curry, Draymond Green. We need to be able to play small ball five and speed this, and we need these sort of wings, two-way wings. And then they tried to do it, but you realize there’s something missing. You can’t beat someone at something they created and they’re best at. So you can’t recreate Steve. You can’t recreate Steph. You can’t recreate Andre Iguodala. You can’t recreate all these guys, Draymond, Klay. And so, actually, I always respected what Houston did. And they were like, “We’re just gonna do the exact opposite. We’re gonna build the best possible version of the exact opposite. Everyone else is trying to do what you do and not as well as you do. We’re gonna try something completely different.” And it almost worked. They almost beat us. They didn’t. They didn’t, right? And that’s all you have to remember. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters, but they came really, really close. They came closer than anybody else, closer than anybody else and I always gave them credit for trying to do it their own way. And I actually think that’s the only way you can really truly be something that is unique, is by building your own unique thing. So do we wanna try to build what Oklahoma City or San Antonio are building? No, because they’ve got singular talents that we’re not gonna be able to replicate, so we gotta find what works best for us. You can’t — you just can’t chase what other people are doing. Now, there are some attributes that I do think, ultimately, are the best and the things that win, I think, we all see them. At the end of the day, it’s competitiveness and it’s IQ, ability to process, like, those two things at the highest level play a lot, but then there’s different things, whether it’s the athleticism, the size and length or the shooting, or maybe it’s on-ball creation, whatever it is, but I love what Oklahoma City’s done. They created their own style of play that a lot of people didn’t necessarily see coming. They have a lot of really powerful, fit defensive players who are really getting you, and then they run their offense, not that dissimilar to we. I mean, they run it through a singular talent and they create an offensive system around the talent. They’ve got some great pieces that really complement that. San Antonio’s doing the same thing. I mean, would you tell me they’d play this exact style if they didn’t have a guy who was singularly talented? Probably not. I actually really love —
24:05 Luke Kornet.
24:05 Luke Kornet, exactly. Yeah, but I really love the way they built that team. And look, I went to college with Mitch Johnson, their head coach, who I’ve always respected immensely and I think is a really great leader. He’s also a really smart basketball mind. He was a kind of genius point guard. He just — he’s got a coach’s voice, too, though. He just sounds like a coach. He does. He has an — Mitch has an incredible voice. Like, he really does. I’ve thought that since the first moment. He has an ability to project and the way he says things just really affects you. He’s built to be a head coach, but he’s got a great basketball feel, too, as a point guard. He knew exactly — I might wanna run a pick-and-roll differently depending on if it’s Brook or Robin Lopez, based on who I want to touch the ball and where I wanna touch them. These were my teammates back in the day and so, like, he just has a great feel for that. I think he has an awesome staff, too, so both those teams, two teams, they really figured it out, especially Oklahoma City. They won a championship last year, right? So they definitely figured it out. Teams in the East, too, are doing a great job of figuring out exactly who they are and playing their own distinct, unique style of basketball. We’ve always had our own version. I think Steve has said there’s some things that we need to tweak and maybe it’s not because the NBA’s changed, but because, at the end of the day, our personnel’s changed. We don’t have the guys who can do exactly what we were doing before and, I said this before, we can’t try to recreate that stuff. There is no Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livingston, Andrew Bogut, Harrison Barnes. We don’t have those guys. Here, we might have players who are somewhat similar. We might be able to find someone similar, but it’s a different team now, so we have to find a different sort of player that’s really effective. And we can stick to our guns in terms of philosophy that Steve has and all that, but there are some tweaks that we have to make, based on who’s here or who could be here. So that’s probably the biggest difference. You’re asking, how do we get back on top of the mountain? We gotta really find a direction that we believe in and go full bore on that and build a team in that way and coach the team in that way and, I mean, this whole discussion started about Steve. Like, Steve is super-energized about that. He really has taken on some new ideas the last couple years and he really wants to do some things differently this upcoming year. Don’t lose the soul of what makes him Steve and what makes this team the Warriors, but tweak some things, so that we can take advantage of where we’re at today.
25:22 That’s such a good question, good answer that I feel stupid asking my little question here. But we have Brandin Podziemski, controversial figure in the Warriors fandom universe.
25:28 Not asking specifically about that, but there’s a recent report that Daryl Morey when he was a Sixers GM tried to trade for him. Is that accurate? And are — Is there just... Can you just tell us, is there more interest around the league in Brandin Podziemski as a player. Then, some of this negative stuff from the fan base, would you like to tell them a little bit about his value?
25:38 I don’t know if I wanna specifically talk about player values, but I can —
25:41 When you’re negotiating a contract, maybe?
25:42 Yeah. I mean, look, I’ll answer this a couple ways. One, Brandin is a really good basketball player. Anybody can try to tell me, they can try to argue with me that he’s not what he is. Objectively, he’s a really, really good basketball player. Happy to get in an argument about that. He is really, really good at a lot of things that we really value, too. He’s also a young player and he’s still learning bits and pieces about his game and where he can go to and about himself as a person. He’s learning all about that stuff and I think he gets a good amount of feedback about it. I know he hears things. I know he asks questions to people. He really wants to be a really good player. He wants to be a great player. He really works and he’s about the right things. I can tell you that there’s a lot of people around the NBA who feel the same way. He’s a player, for sure, that we’re talking to contemporaries across league. They’ll be like, “Man, I really like what Brandin does for you guys. He’s a really good player.” He’s an incredibly hard worker. Those are the sorts of people you wanna bet on, somebody who has great confidence and really wants to get better. I mean, he’s in here every single day, already, just as he has been the last few years. He listens to feedback. I think he’s got a long way to go still. I think he’s got a nice amount of a ceiling left in him, so I mean, look, again, this is a guy who loves to compete, so Brandin, big fan. Your part about the report, that — did Daryl actually say that or did someone write that?
26:29 Someone reported that. There were several players he wanted to try to acquire at the — or put offers out or had discussions and Brandin Podziemski at the trade deadline and Brandin was one.
26:35 Okay, so I’m a little worried I’m gonna go slightly off topic here, but there is an unbelievable amount of noise in the NBA media sphere right now. There always has been and I get why there is. I don’t have a problem with it, but, man, is there a lot of garbage out there these days and I feel bad for the people who, like, their names are involved in it, whether you’re the GM or the player involved and I get why people like this stuff too. But, like, there is a lot of garbage out there and I’m like kinda shocked at how easily people believe this and how easily people spread it these days. And it’s not like an attack on, like, you bringing it up or anything like that.
26:56 No, it’s okay.
26:56 No, I’m really — and you actually —
26:57 Wait, Tim’s a super-spreader, what do you mean?
26:59 Tim, yeah, he loves to get aggregated, is what I heard. He says things specifically to get aggregated. No, I’m just like kind of amazed. Like, there are a lot of insiders out there who don’t know anybody and they just spread rumors. And there’s, I guess, nothing inherently wrong with that. It just doesn’t feel right. But, look, I get stuff all the time. People send me stuff all the time, whether it’s, frankly, friends of mine or text messages or Instagram or Twitter, whatever. I get stuff all the time where people are like, “So-and-so said this. How can you guys not be looking? You’re an idiot.” But I’m just, like, where are people getting this information? And I get that this is big business and people love it, but there is just so much out there that is so false and there’s a lot — there are some people who are really bad about it. They will spread anything you might call it, like clickbait. It’s gotten really bad. I don’t think it really affects our business in a major way and, again, I don’t care that much. I’m just surprised by it, how easily people fall for this stuff sometimes.
27:34 They fall for the stupidest stuff. That’s what, like, that’s what I get.
27:35 Yeah.
27:35 And the stupidest stuff is the one that seems to get spread the fastest, maybe because it’s lurid. But, like, could you guys look at that person, what that person has spread in the last 10 times? It’s all been wrong and this one time, don’t spread it yourself? That’s what —
27:43 Yeah, that’s the other one, is people love to say a bunch of things and then when they get one right, they repost, repost, repost, and then everything else disappears. Yeah, there’s just a lot of information — I mean, I see it all the time. I mean, not to defend my dad at all, but there’s a lot of stuff out there about him.
27:51 You don’t wanna defend your dad? That’s crazy.
27:52 No, I don’t, really. It’s not my job to do it. And he doesn’t — honestly, he’s great about — he knows what his role is and he takes responsibility for everything, so he’s he’s happy to take lumps for the organization. He knows that that’s what happens when you’re there, but there are people who always claim to know what he’s thinking or what he said and I’m incredibly close to the situation. Sometimes I’m like, “That is not remotely what happened.” And then it becomes gospel, so that’s just one example, but I’ve seen this with Mike and with Bob and even with Steve, is people will just put words in their mouth or say what they’re thinking because maybe they overheard part of a conversation or somebody says, “I knew this guy.” And it’s just kind of unbelievable to me how far some of this stuff goes, which was really all an answer to your question about, was player X —
28:18 It wasn’t a trick question. It wasn’t a trick question.
28:20 Yeah, was player X like — I mean, could that team have called us and said, “We have interest in your guy”? Yeah, that might have happened, but that doesn’t mean — that happens all the time in the NBA, by the way. You see somebody and your whole purpose is to go up to them and be like, “Hey, these are the players we like on your team. Who do you like on our team?” Those conversations happen constantly and for it to be like player X was in a trade offer for this, that’s really kind of, I don’t know, that’s taken a little far.
[gargantuan transcript below the paywall 👇 with more excerpts coming soon on this website…]
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