If you’ve been waiting patiently for former Golden State Warriors head coach Mark Jackson’s response to criticism from Warriors co-owner Joe Lacob, we’ve found it. It wasn’t easy, either. In case you missed it, Lacob was recorded at a venture capitalists luncheon last week criticizing Jackson, who was fired after guiding the Warriors to back-to-back playoff appearances:
“Part of it was that he couldn’t get along with anybody else in the organization. And look, he did a great job, and I’ll always compliment him in many respects, but you can’t have 200 people in the organization not like you…
…(the decision) was based on what was good for the organization as a whole. And when I say the organization as a whole I don’t mean just the team and just the 15 players that are involved and the coaching staff. I mean everybody. There’s 200 employees here.”
Lacob also compared Jackson to new head coach Steve Kerr:
“Right now, (Kerr) looks great. I think he will be great. And he did the one big thing that I wanted more than anything else from Mark Jackson he just wouldn’t do, in all honesty, which is hire the very best.”
“Carte blanche. Take my wallet. Do whatever it is to get the best assistants there are in the world. Period. End of story. Don’t want to hear it. And (Jackson’s) answer . . . was, ‘Well, I have the best staff.’ No you don’t. And so with Steve, very, very different.”
Once Lacob realized his remarks were made public, he reached out to Jackson with an apology. It appears that message may have fallen on deaf ears, as Jackson brought up the subject before his congregation at True Life Worship Center during his weekly sermon. The following quotes were transcribed by Diamond Leung, a Warriors beat writer for Bay Area News Group, who deserves some sort of medal for sitting through video of the THREE-HOUR service to give us the juicy tidbits:
Former Warriors coach Mark Jackson referenced Joe Lacob in his sermon at his church Sunday, saying the co-owner “put me on blast.”
Smiling as he spoke to members of a cheering congregation, Jackson said in recorded comments that Lacob “said I was good for nothing, an owner that knew me for three years and spent a couple of minutes around me, an owner that had the audacity to say that 200 folks don’t like me in the business.”
Hopefully this will be the end of their little beef, because the last thing the red hot Warriors need is a distraction involving their owner and a former head coach.
[IBA]
About John Ferensen