Barber: Tricky summer ahead for Warriors' Bob Myers

OAKLAND - Thursday night was a time for grief, pride, soul-searching and nostalgia for the Golden State Warriors. That lasted about 12 hours, until general manager Bob Myers and coach Steve Kerr were blindfolded, given a cigarette each and marched before yet another group of reporters.

The NBA draft is Thursday. Free agents can begin speaking to potential suitors the day after that, and can sign as early as July 6. There simply isn't time to wallow in an NBA Finals defeat, or the staggering injuries that precipitated it.

“The NFL draft isn't five days after the Super Bowl,” Myers observed. “It's not 15 days until free agency. We gotta figure that out. Because we're gonna be judged on that for the rest of the calendar year.”

And perhaps for the rest of their NBA careers.

That's especially true of Myers, who now embarks on by far the most complex offseason during his time with the Warriors.

His team will look much different at the start of the 2019-20 regular season than it did at the start of the 2019 postseason, that is a given. How smoothly it lands in the wake of career-altering injuries to Kevin Durant (ruptured Achilles tendon) and Klay Thompson (torn ACL), and the springboard it finds to the seasons that follow, will largely define Myers' reputation.

I know, the man has already won three championship rings. He's a key figure in the creation and maintenance of a basketball dynasty. He was NBA Executive of the Year in both 2015 and 2017. He's a made man.

“Everybody looks at a GM and thinks, ‘Well, how is this guy as a GM? Here's who he picked,'” Kerr said Friday. “The term is ‘general manager.' It's not ‘general picker.' You know? It's ‘general manager.' Bob manages people. He manages our coaching staff, he manages the players. So what he means to the group goes way beyond who he picked with the 39th pick in 2013.”

All true. But it does matter whom Myers selects in the draft, and whom he signs in free agency - now more than ever. And his record isn't spotless.

The last Warriors draft pick who truly made an impact was Kevon Looney, taken in 2015. Since then, the team's draft-day pickups have been Damian Jones, Patrick McCaw, Jordan Bell and Jacob Evans. Doesn't exactly knock your socks off, right? Granted, Myers swung one of the greatest transactions in NBA history when he signed Durant in the summer of 2016. But let's be honest. He didn't do that alone. A four-man committee of players famously flew to the Hamptons on Long Island to sell the Warriors to Durant.

I'm not knocking Myers. I think he's been a huge asset. I'm saying that whatever he does in the next two months will be as important as what he's done over the past several years.

And it's going to be complicated. Hoo boy, is it complicated.

This summer was always going to be tricky for the Warriors. One cost of going to five consecutive NBA Finals is that your players become more expensive. Golden State's projected salary cap allocations for the coming season, according to Spotrac.com, add up to $120.8 million. That includes Durant, who can choose to opt in to the final year of his current contract. But it does not include the five men who are about to enter free agency - Thompson, Looney, DeMarcus Cousins, Andrew Bogut and Jonas Jerebko - or the two who can receive qualifying offers, Bell and Quinn Cook.

Add the “cap holdings” for those seven players, and the tab jumps to $167.9 million. The 2019-20 NBA luxury tax threshold is $132 million. That excess of roughly $48 million would cost Joe Lacob and Peter Guber (and their nervous co-investors) nearly $200 million in luxury taxes if the Warriors were to retain every player currently on the roster.

“Pay it!” you cry, understanding the joy in spending other people's money. And Lacob and Guber might have been willing to creep close to that figure a week ago. The Warriors move to Chase Center in San Francisco next season, and will reap huge profits. But how huge? With Durant likely to miss an entire season and Thompson projected for at least a nine-month absence, how good will the Warriors be in 2019-20? Good enough, and entertaining enough, to sell out Chase for 81 regular-season dates, and to keep the flow of caps and T-shirts primed?

Everything has been thrown into question by those two leg injuries, suffered in the final two games of the season.

ESPN's Brian Windhorst reported Friday that the Warriors still intend to offer Durant and Thompson five-year max deals. You'd think Durant would accept in a heartbeat, but who knows? The superstar is free to opt in to that last year with the Warriors. He'd get $31.5 million, and would be free to shop his services in the summer of 2020.

“Yeah, I mean, he's obviously got that right for his deal, but I don't know what he wants to do,” Myers said. “That's obviously his option.”

If Durant and Thompson do sign up for the Warriors' return to San Francisco, how will all the other dominoes fall? Looney is expected to fetch a mid-level exception somewhere; would the Warriors match it? How about Cousins? Everyone figured he'd have one interesting year in Oakland, then cash in with a big contract and bounce to another team. Does his relatively minor quadriceps injury affect his market value? Cousins should be far more attractive to the Warriors now that they'll be without two of their top three scorers in 2019-20, but how high would they go for the former All-Star center?

And then there's the matter of depth. It was a big problem for the Warriors this year, and especially deep in the playoffs. You knew it would be. That was always the trade-off for having Kevin Durant. Could the Warriors stomach a thin bench for another season in the interest of retaining Durant - even if he isn't contributing a single point?

Can the Warriors afford to keep Andre Iguodala, who will turn 36 in January and is slated to make $17.2 million in 2019-20? Will Shaun Livingston retire? Do Cook, Bell, Bogut and Jerebko fit into their plans? Can they risk riding out the final year of Draymond Green's contract, hoping he'll forego the free-agency waters in 2020?

It's a tangled mess, and somewhere in the middle of the heap is Bob Myers, trying to maintain his mellow demeanor under the weight of a hemorrhaging dynasty.

“I've always said about free agency, it's never what you think,” Myers noted. “I mean, who would've thought we'd be walking into free agency like (this)? Nobody would've. Nobody. Not any fan. Not any member of our organization or from the outside would have predicted, ‘Well, this is what you're gonna face.' But that's what's here. That's what's in front of us.”

And Myers isn't allowed to blink.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com.