Warriors’ GM Myers will depart

“The dominoes are starting to fall,” Tony Kornheiser said on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption. 

He was talking about the Warriors, specifically the departure of Bob Myers, the architect of those great Warriors teams. 

An overstatement. Myers is leaving. That was speculation weeks ago, now it’s a fact. So is the aging of the Warriors roster and new NBA salary limitations.

But this is not about the game of dominoes. 

Rather about the sport of basketball, where the concern is whether the shots fall — or if they don’t whether you’re able to grab the rebounds. Strong organizations — and with our championships in six seasons the Warriors are among the strongest — rely on more than a single individual, no matter how intuitive and capable he (or she) might be.

There’s an old French saying, everything passes, about our impermanence not about contributing an assist on a jump shot.

Bob Myers is a great story. Raised in the Bay Area, UCLA, player agent and then basketball operations president and GM of the Warriors, during the most successful era of their existence.

But he’s 48, a family man, and the GM position is all-consuming. Once you’re at the top — Myers twice was NBA executive of the year — there’s only one way to go.  And it’s not up.

Maybe it’s a little different, but when he was winning with the 49ers Bill Walsh said the usual NFL coach doesn’t last more than 10 years with a team. 

“Either you get fired for losing or the players stop listening to you if you’re winning.”

The late John Wooden, whose teams took all those NCAA titles at UCLA, insisted winning was tougher than losing. 

“No matter what we did,” said Wooden. “It wasn’t enough.” 

Now, for a time at least, Myers has had enough. 

"The bottom line is this job,” Myers said in an afternoon media conference. “The one I’m in, I would say this for any professional general manager or coach, requires complete engagement, complete effort, one-thousand percent.”

“If you can’t do it, then you shouldn't do it. That's the answer to the question of why. I can’t do that to our players, I can’t do that to Joe, Peter (owners Joe Lacob, Peter Guber), can’t do it to myself. And that’s the question I’ve been wrestling with.”

Myers can stop wrestling. He can step out of the ring.  

You just wonder how much he was affected by the punch Draymond Green — a Myers draftee threw at Jordan Poole — or if James Wiseman hadn’t been the team’s first pick in the draft a couple of seasons ago   

Myers had been with the Warriors for 12 years. As with any break-up, this won’t be easy. Myers teared up at what is apparently his farewell words to the media. He did a hell of a job — an unprecedented one.