Mike Dunleavy Jr.’s way back to the Golden State Warriors, the franchise that once drafted him, was thanks to his former agent.
Bob Myers represented Dunleavy early on in his playing days. They became close friends. Myers joined the Warriors in 2011. In 2012 he became general manager. Dunleavy left the Warriors in 2007 after a tumultuous run, but ended his 15-year playing career in 2017 after moving from Indianapolis to Chicago, to Milwaukee, to Cleveland and to Atlanta.
Around the time Dunleavy retired, the Warriors’ front office shifted to Myers. Jerry West went to the Clippers. Travis Schlenk went to the Hawks. Myers felt he needed another trusted voice at his side in a decision-making room that included Joe Lacob, the wayward majority owner, and Kirk Lacob, his eldest son who rose in the rankings.
Myers was given the green light to hire Dunleavy, who quickly decided on his next career path. They took him on as a pro scout in September 2018 with the expectation that it would eventually grow to more.
“The only thing he knew he didn’t want to do was coach,” Myers told me of Dunleavy at the time. “It’s a bit surprising because I think he would be a good coach. But he focused on the front office.”
As announced on Friday, Dunleavy is now the Warriors’ next general manager. He replaces Myers, a franchise legend. Here’s a timeline of how Dunleavy got to this point, starting with a complicated beginning of his relationship with Golden State.
Designed in 2002
The Warriors lost 61 games in the 2001-02 season. So did the Bulls. They had the worst record in basketball and had an equal chance of winning the draft lottery game at 22.5 percent. Yao Ming was the prize. The Warriors and their fans knew what a player and what a marketing opportunity Yao represented, and they were desperate to win.
They didn’t. The Rockets made it with an 8.9 percent chance. You have Yao. The Bulls, draft runners-up, got Jay Williams. The Warriors, who took third place, got Dunleavy.
He’s had a better career than Drew Gooden or Nikoloz Tskitishvili or Dajuan Wagner, the three guys who were drafted right after him. But Warriors fans didn’t worry about the alternatives. They saw Yao, an instant star in Houston, and Dunleavy, a solid role player with an apparent long-term cap below the All-Star floor. The team kept losing to much bigger issues. The organization had more pernicious problems.
But Dunleavy often felt the brunt of the Oracle Arena boos because of the third pick overall and the five-year $44 million term — negotiated by Myers’ agency — for his renewal. He criticized the fans for the constant booing, which heated him up.
“Looking back, I probably didn’t have the right attitude to be third choice,” Dunleavy told me of rejoining the franchise in 2018. “You have to go out there and put up numbers, and I was probably too much of a team player.” oriented and interested in making the team better by playing alongside my teammates. I probably should have been more aggressive, got going and done all that.”
The Warriors haven’t been bad in Dunleavy’s four-and-a-half seasons. They’ve just consistently been bad enough to live below the playoff line and continue to disappoint the fan base: 38-44, 37-45, 34-48 and 34-48.
Shortly before the trade deadline of his fifth season, Dunleavy was traded to the Pacers. The deal brought Stephen Jackson to the Warriors, turning that team into the “We Believe” run and quickly erasing memories of the Dunleavy era. He stayed in the Eastern Conference for the rest of his career and was living in New York City when the Warriors signed him in 2018. He rejoined a franchise very different from the one he left.
“It really is,” Dunleavy said. “When I was here, I was pretty sure that we were strong in two areas. Our two best things were our tech (Eric Housen) and our PR guy (Raymond Ridder). Ironically, those are the two things that stayed. Everything else has changed and everything else has turned out well.”
GO DEEPER
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Scouts in 2018
Dunleavy spent much of his first year in the front office attending NBA games in Brooklyn, gathering information and learning about the job. As the collegiate season progressed, the Warriors’ scouting department, headed by Larry Harris, dispatched him as a collegiate scout to that region of the country.
Dunleavy attended Villanova games and training sessions to watch Eric Paschall. He attended the Big Ten tournament and watched three of Jordan Poole’s games up close. His advice and information was used on both picks. The Warriors drafted Poole 28th and Paschall 41st in the 2019 draft.
“In these training sessions you sometimes see guys doing things that they don’t necessarily do in games,” Dunleavy told me about Paschall in 2019. “When I could see some things Eric was doing – especially with the ball in his hands, how he was making plays – I felt a little bit better in terms of his overall ability.”
Dunleavy was particularly optimistic about Poole.
“We had Jordan with us for two training sessions,” Dunleavy said at the time. “I thought he did really well in the first round. Then we brought him back for a second and put him up against some bigger, more physical guys. More two/three than one/two. He had great ball handling and his ability to make plays – maybe not something you see very often in his collegiate environment – was impressive. Then I felt like watching him and there was some concern as to whether his physical condition could endure in the NBA. He did really well in this training. That was one of those moments where everyone felt comfortable and said, ‘You know, this boy is going to make it through.’”
These two assessments (conducted back in 2019) give you a glimpse into Dunleavy’s ethos as a talent appraiser. For him, skill and play structure are in the foreground. He was a versatile winger who could do a little bit of everything in his prime – passing, shooting, rebounding and scoring in a variety of ways. He has a respected eye and feel for the game. His father was a former NBA head coach and general manager.
Here’s what Myers said of Dunleavy after the 2019 playoffs: “He has a wide range of skills. He can go to Steve Kerr and talk about our offense and has a good platform to talk about it. Because he played for some great coaches, was a really smart player and his dad was a coach. He does it in a very humble way.
“Even I sat with Mike at a few playoff games and I said, ‘What do you see out there?’ I’m not arrogant enough to think I know more about an NBA offense than he does. So I’m just asking him questions. He takes a deeper look – a bit like Andre (Iguodala) and Shaun (Livingston) – just a brilliant basketball mind. It kind of comes naturally.”
Deputy GM in 2019
Kevin Durant, who recently recovered from a torn Achilles tendon, was in New York City when free agency began in the summer of 2019. So that’s where Myers had to camp. The Warriors’ chances of keeping Durant were slimming, but Myers wanted to be there in person to pull things off. He had the best relationship in the organization with Durant.
Dunleavy was living in New York at the time, so it worked out just fine. Dunleavy joined Myers in the frantic first few hours of the free hand and was in the same Ritz-Carlton room as Myers when the Warriors were able to strike a sign-and-trade with Brooklyn that eventually brought them back D’Angelo Russell that led to Andrew Wiggins and the election that became Jonathan Kuminga at the next close.
“It was crazy. Insane,” Dunleavy told me in 2019. “We’re in a hotel room, jammed. I take tons of notes, pull Ritz-Carlton legal pads next to the phone and jot down information. When I’m on the phone with someone and he when I’m on the phone with someone, I’ll write them notes like, “That’s what this guy says.” It was strikingly unfashionable in the sense that while we had a couple of phones and an iPad, we weren’t in a great position because the rest of our team in the West was.”
Myers added: “I remember plugging my portable charger into my phone because it wasn’t able to charge the phone at all. Multiple conversations are held, calls are merged, and attempts are made to get everyone on the phone and coordinate on decisions. Different time zones. So much information. Pretty overwhelming.”
At some point in a quiet moment amidst the chaos, Myers glanced at Dunleavy and asked a question.
“It is,” Myers said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
And Myers recalled the situation: “I think it was maybe one or two in the morning. Because in that moment we were deep in the deep. It was a scramble. The ground kept moving. What happens. This is how free hand works. You try to capture so many different scenarios in your head and mind. It comes down to your relationships and trust because none of that is formalized. But he looked at me with that alacrity in his eyes: Absolutely. I think it got him more involved than it put him off.”
Vice President of Basketball Operations in 2021
Dunleavy moved back to the Bay Area from New York ahead of the 2019–20 season. He decided to plunge into the depths of the job. That’s what Myers was hoping for Dunleavy when he targeted him as a West/Schlenk replacement of sorts. Dunleavy quickly became a sublime voice. In 2021, he was given the title of vice president of basketball operations.
Over the past few seasons, Dunleavy has taken on more and more of the day-to-day responsibilities of a general manager as Myers has taken a backseat and spent the past year or more contemplating his future.
Dunleavy represented Myers during the league’s general manager summit meetings. He chaired meetings and led initiatives on the ground. When the Warriors hired Kenny Atkinson and gave their analysis expert Pabail Sidhu a stronger voice over the last two seasons, it was Dunleavy who often served as the front office representative between Atkinson and Sidhu while the Warriors attempted to introduce a stronger voiced analysis approach to the ground.
It wasn’t hard to see which way things were headed. Dunleavy was often the most visible member of the front office on road trips throughout the season. After a shootout, he would spend 15 minutes in a lengthy discussion with Kerr or be escorted off the side in conversation with a player.
Following the Warriors’ Game 1 loss to the Lakers in the second round last month, Dunleavy was spotted having an intense chat in the weight room with Myers, Steph Curry and Draymond Green. It felt like a representative moment of passing the torch: Myers prepared both Dunleavy and the franchise executives for the kind of challenging conversations they would have to navigate together when Myers was gone.
That time is now. Myers announced his resignation a few weeks ago, supporting Dunleavy’s upheaval. Dunleavy was officially announced as the team’s next general manager on Friday. Joe Lacob will still have strong veto power, as always, and Kirk Lacob is expected to have some degree of greater influence, although he already held a lot of weight.
But it’s Dunleavy who takes on the most prominent front office role as the Warriors prepare for a monumental offseason.
(Photo by Mike Dunleavy and Jamal Crawford: Jim Poorten/NBAE via Getty Images)