by Mark McDermott
The dynasty was in its later stages but still possessed many of the elements that had given rise to its greatness. These included creative leadership, an attention to detail, an openness to fresh ideas, and the unparalleled gifts of the man a rival king, LeBron James, has described as the player who “changed the narrative…who defied odds.”
In other words, The Golden State Warriors still had Steph Curry, the best shooter in the history of the National Basketball Association. Something, however, was amiss.
In January of last year, the team had fallen six games below .500. They were the defending NBA champions and had won four of the previous seven titles, but their decline had been startlingly rapid.
“If you don’t have a consistent sense of urgency in this league, you lose,” said Draymond Green, the controversial yet cerebral and multi-skilled power forward who’d been a team leader throughout their championship years.
Four hundred miles south, a 10-year-old boy in Manhattan Beach shared Green’s sentiments. Kyle Lu was only a fourth grader, but he’d been watching the Warriors as long as he could remember. Literally. His parents, Culbert and Candice Lu, were both from the Bay Area and were big Warriors fans. Kyle had inherited their fervency. His entire life spanned the Warrior’s dynasty.
A lot of 10-year-old boys are NBA fans. But few watch the games the way Kyle does. He loves math, and he’s analytical, so he studies basketball. Especially defense, and rebounding.
“I’ve been watching Warriors basketball since I was really, really young, and so basically I just got in the habit of wanting to look at stats,” Kyle said. “And defense is half the game.”
Kyle knew this team was missing something essential. Both defense and rebounding are about urgency. The Warriors were deficient in each area.
The previous summer, they’d failed to re-sign Gary Payton II, who was not a star player but a key cog in their last championship. Payton, the son of Gary “The Glove” Payton, like his father, is a gritty player and lockdown defender. He plays every second of the game with urgency.
Payton’s absence, Kyle thought, was part of the problem.
“I thought that was a bad move,” he said.
Kyle is unusual in ways well beyond his nuanced view of basketball. He and his mother frequently have talks, and the questions he asks are uncommonly clear-eyed.
“He’s just always been that kid who’s inquisitive,” she said. “Even when he was really young, he would ask me, ‘What is life all about?’ ‘What happens when you die?’ And he’s always been thinking about how he can help his family. He’s been adamant, he doesn’t want any money from us – he wants to be his own person…He’s just been this very empathetic soul. It’s been fun to watch him, but we also try to support him and answer the questions as much as we can.”
When he was eight, Kyle started making life plans. First, he started thinking about financial independence. Towards that end, he put some of his savings in a stock portfolio. His process was simple – he picked reputable, established companies that he liked and that he would purchase from himself. His first purchase was Apple. Then he bought stock in Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nike, and Tesla. He also made a smart speculative buy in Under Armour, because he knew that they’d signed Steph Curry and figured (correctly, as it turned out) that the company’s stock would go up when his next signature shoe came out.
“Then he would watch the market each day when he was in 3rd grade and tell me when he wanted to sell,” Candice Lu said.
Second, he started thinking about a career. He’s an avid athlete who plays both baseball and basketball, and so of course he’d love to be a pro player. But Kyle is also a realist who understands statistical probabilities. He understood that the chances of being good enough to be a pro athlete were minimal. He decided to go into sports management. He did some research, found out that Stanford has a great program in that area, and decided that is where he would go to college.
Then Kyle started thinking about getting a job. It wasn’t that he hadn’t already worked. He ran his first lemonade stand as a kindergartner and made $17.89. He worked similar side hustles throughout elementary school. But that wasn’t going to pay for college.
He was a little frustrated. It turns out it’s not that easy for an eight-year-old to find work. He investigated dog walking but found out companies that hire dog walkers generally don’t hire anyone under 18. Kyle thought about finding work for two years before he finally decided to think bigger.
“He kept bugging me about a job,” Candice Lu said. “At the beginning, he was like, ‘I’m just going to go sell Prime drinks at school for a margin,’ or, ‘After my basketball game, I’m going to walk around and sell bottles of water.’ So, it was always kind of like that hustle. But he kept going, ‘I really want a job.’”
Finally, one day last year, in late January, Kyle asked his mother, “Is there anything you can do to help me?”
“Well,” she said. “What is it that you really want to do?”
“Well, if I can’t play professional sports, I want to work in the back office for a team,” he said.
Candice Lu has her own tech consulting company. She’s used to cold calling, and often uses a service called RocketReach to find emails. So Kyle identified the teams he’d like to work for – the San Francisco 49ers (his favorite football team), UCLA (where his parents went to college, and met) Stanford, and for the Golden State Warriors. His mom found emails for each organization, including the direct email for the Warrior’s legendary general manager, Bob Myers. She told Kyle to write his emails and she would help him send them.
“But just don’t expect anything,” she told her son. “These people are super busy. But it’s probably cooler coming from a 10-year-old than it would be coming from a 45-year-old.”
“Dear Mr. Myers,” Kyle wrote the Warriors GM.
My name is Kyle Lu, and I am 10 years old. I am a huge sports fan and I am very good at math. My parents went to UCLA and grew up in the Bay Area, so I am a really, really big UCLA basketball and Warriors fan. I wanted to email you and let you know that I would love to learn from you.
So, is there any way I can have some sort of internship or just shadow you or the team this summer? I am a straight A student, and I also follow all the statistics from the NBA, NFL, MLB, so I think I can handle learning from anyone who works with the Golden State Warriors. I play club sports now, but if I can’t make it as a professional athlete, I think I would be really good working in the sports business. Being able to follow someone who helps with drafting the team or the trades or anything like that would be really cool.
I know I’m only 10, but I want to start working as early as possible and start following my dreams, and I really think I have a lot of good ideas.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Kyle Lu
The next day, Kyle received a response. He had obtained his first job interview.
The longshot
Bob Myers had read Kyle’s email and something about it struck a chord.
Myers’ own life story is a testament to the power of defying odds. He’d grown up going to Warriors games in the cheap seats and was thus a lifelong devoted fan. During his freshman year at UCLA, in 1993, he “walked on” to the Bruins basketball team – meaning he didn’t have a scholarship, but tried out for the team and made it. Remarkably, for such a longshot, Myers ended up earning a scholarship the following year, and though he didn’t play much, the iconic Sports Illustrated image of him lifting point Tyus Edney off the ground after Edney made a legendary last-minute shot to win UCLA the national championship became a part of basketball lore. After going with the team to meet President Bill Clinton at the White House and appearing on the Jay Leno show, his teammates took to calling him Forrest Gump, the guy who just happened to be there. But as the adage goes, luck is when opportunity arises and you are prepared for it. Myers was always prepared. He had an unparalleled work ethic, and grew, both physically and in his understanding of the game, in his four years at UCLA. He went on to become a meaningful contributor during his last two years at UCLA, and afterwards attended night school at Loyola Law. He became a sports agent, and in 2011 was hired by the Warriors as an assistant GM. Unexpectedly, only a year later, Myers was named GM. The team had not won a championship in 40 years, but in 2015, the Warriors won the first of the four NBA titles they would win under Myers.
Myers saw something special in Kyle’s email and forwarded it to Onsi Saleh, the Warriors’ Team Counsel and Vice President of Basketball Strategy. Teams like the Warriors get many such emails, but when brought Saleh’s attention to Kyle’s message, Myers was being something more than kind. He understood that from little things, big things grow.
Saleh was likewise intrigued.
“Hey Kyle,” Saleh wrote. “I hope you are doing well…Bob connected with me, and I would love to connect with you on the phone sometime in the coming weeks.”
“Kyle was like jumping up and down, bouncing off the walls,” his mother said. “He was so excited.”
Kyle’s original email hadn’t mentioned it, but his father, Culbert Lu, had gone to UCLA with Bob Myers. They’d both majored in Economics, and Lu was good friends with Myers roommate, who was also an economics major.
“So we would actually study together sometimes,” Culbert Lu said. “I wouldn’t consider myself friends with him, but I was really close friends with his roomate, and we were also in law school together. So it’s been pretty remarkable to see Bob’s career progression.”
Now their lives were intersecting again due to the unusual basketball acumen and clarity of purpose the Warriors saw in Culbert Lu’s son.
“Bob sent me the email, and we went over it together, like, ‘This is really interesting,’” Saleh recalled. “Hundreds of people hit us up every year, whether through emails or Linkedin or whatever. But never anybody like this. It was just, ‘This kid is way ahead of the curve.’ This kid is really interesting, and I am going to write back to him, I don’t want to miss anything. So I kind of took the lead on this.”
“I just thought it was so fascinating that he was thinking that this is something he is going to do with his future, like be a GM, or run strategy or manage the salary cap,” Saleh said. “It was intriguing because Kyle’s thoughts were more original than most of the university students who come looking for a job. We got a lot of people who aren’t even really interested in basketball, but are more interested in just being associated with the Warriors and making it look good on their resume. But there was definitely a passion in Kyle’s email.”
After exchanging emails, Kyle and Saleh talked on the phone.
“He asked me what I thought we could change with the team because when he called me the Warriors were kind of doing that,” Kyle said. “I told him that we needed more defense because Gary Payton II left. And that our perimeter defense was really bad.”
Saleh came away from their first conversation mightily impressed. He remembered being an NBA fanatic himself at 10, but it wasn’t like this. He grew up just thinking about playing, not analyzing the game at such a high level.
“I realized he definitely had a well-rounded process when it comes to this stuff,” Saleh said. “There’s a logic, a reason, behind how he sees the game, like valuing size and defense – really, more than some NBA coaches do. It’s just really cool that he pays such close attention to the game, and what the trends are today. That’s pretty rare for a 10-year-old. I thought, ‘You must watch a ton of basketball to realize some of these dynamics.’ And he’s watching multiple levels of prospects, not only the NBA, but college, too.”
Saleh is an NBA longshot himself. He grew up in Canada, in Edmonton, Alberta, and studied biological sciences and history at the University of Alberta before earning a Doctor of Law degree from Tulane University in 2017. He was a basketball diehard, but his career trajectory didn’t appear to be on target for the NBA. He was a legal clerk for the 22nd Judicial District of Louisiana prior to earning an internship and then a job with the San Antonio Spurs.
Like Kyle, he made an unusual play to follow his passion. He and law school buddies went to the NBA summer league in Las Vegas, and Saleh was bold enough to introduce himself to R.J. Buford, the truly legendary GM (and now CEO) of the San Antonio Spurs. Saleh thought he was simply networking and was surprised when Buford actually listened to him. He was more surprised when the Spurs gave him an internship, and then hired him, beginning an NBA career that has continued to ascend. He went from an intern to director of strategy in five years in San Antonio, and was hired by the Warriors in 2021. Both teams are among the most admired in all of sports due to their ability to not only win championships but to build creative organizational cultures that are studied far beyond the sports world.
“R.J. Buford is one of my best friends in the world, and Bob Meyers is one of my best friends in the world,” Saleh said. “And specifically, those two guys, they just essentially push forward this culture of curiosity and character and unselfishness. Like in San Antonio, when I first started out, I was from a law background. I grew up playing and knew strategies and the salary cap and all that stuff, but when I arrived in San Antonio, I was at the bottom of the totem pole. And the coolest thing I heard was at my first meeting, with our CEO and everyone else, we were all sitting there and R.J. goes, ‘Listen, here in San Antonio, we don’t care where the answer comes from. We just want the right answer.’ So literally, if you are an intern, or you are a GM, you have a voice. It’s about the process of finding the right answer, leaving no stone unturned.”
A week after Saleh’s first conversation with Kyle – coincidentally, or not, depending on how one looks at the mystical workings of the basketball universe – the Warriors made a big trade. They reacquired Gary Payton II. Not at all coincidentally, they also started winning. They closed out the month of February with a five game win streak, and closed out the season strongly, finishing six games above .500 and earning the sixth seed in the Western Conference, thus avoiding the dreaded one-game “play-in” tourney. They went on to upset the Sacramento Kings in the first round of the playoffs before falling to the Lakers in the second round. It wasn’t a championship run, but a necessary course readjustment had been made.
Kyle and Saleh stayed in touch. In late March, Kyle and his parents attended a game, and he and Saleh met in person. Saleh gave Kyle an assignment: to scout college players and make recommendations for whom the Warriors should select in June’s NBA Draft.
On May 3, the day after the Warrior’s loss to the Lakers in Game 1 the series they would eventually lose in six games, Kyle sent along his recommendations.
Hi Mr. Onsi,
That was a really tough loss against the Lakers tonight. We need to rebound better. I know last time we met, you asked me for some advice on the draft, so here are some picks that I think could be good.
Option #1 : Kris Murray
He has been performing well ever since I talked to you about him and we need more rebounds, which he will provide. He is also 6’8 220 pounds and has a very similar game to his brother Keegan on the Kings.
Option #2 Trading for a different pick
This might be a little biased for UCLA but Jaime Jaquez Jr. has been UCLA’s best player on the court for his time as a Bruin and has a good attitude on and off the court. Trading back wouldn’t be a bad idea because you could probably get him as a late 1st rounder.
Option #3 Trayce Jackson-Davis.
Trayce Jackson-Davis has fallen off in a lot of people’s mock drafts but I think he is still a great player. The 6’9 forward averaged 20.9 points per game while managing to haul the 7th most rebounds in Division 1 basketball.
Let me know what you think and if I can do anything else to help. Go Warriors!
Sincerely,
Kyle
On June 22, with the 57th pick of the NBA Draft, the Warriors selected Trayce Jackson-Davis.
A Sense of Where You Are
Basketball is often about more than basketball.
Because it is a highly interdependent team game but with only five players on each side competing on a court that is only 94 feet long and 50 feet wide, the way a player sees the court tends to reveal his or her character. The true greats are the players who make those around them better. The interplay, when the game is played well, resembles a jazz quintet as much as it does any other sport.
The great journalist John McPhee in 1965 wrote a portrait for The New Yorker of college basketball player Bill Bradley that was titled, “A Sense of Where You Are.” The title came from a scene in the story in which Bradley, who played college ball for Princeton, repeatedly made shots over his shoulder while looking the reporter in the eyes as they conversed. McPhee was dumbfounded and asked how Bradley could do this. Bradley said he’d been playing basketball so long that he didn’t need to look. “You develop a sense of where you are,” he said.
The description was about more than basketball. Bradley would go on to become an NBA champion with the New York Knickerbockers, but only after an unusual decision to take two years off after college because he’d been accepted as a Rhodes Scholar in Italy. He would go on to an illustrious career as a United States Senator. Bradley had a sense of his place in the world well beyond the 94 feet of the basketball court, and the way he played revealed this. McPhee’s title proved prophetic.
Kyle Lu plays basketball and baseball. He’s not the biggest kid, or the quickest, but he sees the game better than most. His father, who coached him in club sports when Kyle was a little younger, said he’s always had a prenatural understanding of the games.
“In basketball, he’s not really an actual scorer, but he sees the court, and he can even kind of manipulate the court a little bit, even at that age – you know, trying to get the ball to the right spots, and to the right kids,” Culbert Lu said. “Even though he’s not necessarily the kid who is going for 20 a game. He’s very cerebral. In baseball, which is his primary sport, he’s not the the fastest kid and doesn’t have the stongest arm, but he’s very intelligent and that is what the coaches tend to appreciate over time – they never have to tell him where to be on the field, or the court, more than once, or in any given situation. He gets it. He’s always in the right spot to take the cutoff through, and always throws the ball to the right base. He anticipates the plays.”
But there is another quality that Kyle’s father has seen in his son for which he is especially proud.
“Basketball does kind of reveal your character,” Lu said. “Are you there to pick up your teammates? Or are you there for yourself? Kyle has always been one to pick up his teammates.”
This also translates to Kyle’s fledgling career as a basketball scout. It’s factored into how he evaluates. All three of the players he recommended to the Warriors possess these kind of qualities. They are all unselfish, hard-nosed players with uncommonly good court vision, or “basketball IQ,” as it is sometimes called. All were somewhat unheralded in the draft process, as well, particularly Jackson-Davis. He was a four year college player – which is fairly unusual for future NBA players in these days of “one and done” when the best players tend to leave college as soon as they are age-eligible for the league – and thus definitely not a trendy prospect on the draft boards. He was also kind of an old school big man, one who rebounds and defends rather than hanging out on the perimeter shooting a lot of 3s. But Trayce-Jackson has had a highly successful rookie season, working his way into the team’s rotation and even starting at times. He turned out to be exactly what the Warriors needed and looks to be a big part of their future.
“Trayce has been a stud for us,” Saleh said.
Of course, the Warriors have a team of scouts and an extensive draft evaluation process. Nobody is suggesting Kyle’s identifcation of Trayce-Jackson was the deciding factor. But Saleh remembers being surprised, and once again impressed, by Kyle’s recommendation.
“Again, it came back to defense and rebounding,” he said. “It’s pretty phenomenal. He’s just in tune with it, man.”
On draft day, a celebratory scream was emitted at the Lu house in Manhattan Beach.
“I remember the moment he found out, because I hear running up and down the hallway, and screaming,” said Kyle’s mom, Candice. “Like, what is happening? Is something on fire?”
“They picked my pick. They picked my pick!” Kyle told her, literally jumping up and down.
Looking back, Kyle is mainly surprised that Jackson-Davis was still on the draft board at 57.
“I wasn’t expecting him to be that late,” he said. “But that’s okay. We still got him.”
Defense and rebounding are about heart, about wanting it more than your opponenent. These qualities are, in a sense, about character. And this Warriors dynasty has not generally been about their superior athleticism, but about an organizational culture that prizes not only a certain type of player but a certain type of person. They are a team full of longshots. Their coach, Steve Kerr, who was a protégé of San Antonio coach Greg Popavich, comes from a family of academics. His father, Malcom, was assasinated when serving the president of American University in Lebanon. It’s not the expected backdrop for an NBA career. Gary Payton II was cut by several teams before finding his place in the league with the Warriors. And Steph Curry might seem like an obvious superstar, but this was not always the case. He is only 6’3 and in his first years in the league it appeared his career would be limited by chronic ankle injuries. Instead, through a work ethic that is legendary even among elite athletes, he’s become the smallest player to have the biggest impact in the history of basketball.
For Culbert Lu, who has been an avid Warriors fan his entire life, having a window into this organization, and watching its leaders embrace his son, has been deeply rewarding.
“Even just that they would take the time to meet with a ten-year-old kid,” he said. “I was blown away by it.”
The Lu family went to the Bay Area over the holidays and bought tickets for the Warriors game on December 30 against the Dallas Mavericks. Culbert reached out to Saleh. He wanted to meet up for coffee or a beer just to thank him for all Saleh and the Warriors had done for his son.
“Just to say thank you for essentially humoring our son,” he said. “You know, when he writes Onsi, he writes back and really encourages him to pursue this, and really gives him this kind of stepping stone to broaden his own thought process, to see what’s possible out there. ‘Maybe I can do this.’”
No problem, Saleh said, it’s been a joy. He offered to send them tickets, and Lu demurred, but Saleh insisted. The family was able to enter the arena through the players security entrance, and then walk through the stadium down the players tunnel to the the court. UCLA alum Kevon Looney was taking practice shots.
“Go Bruins!” Culbert yelled, and Looney looked over and gave a thumbs up.
“I was blown away,” Culbert said.
A Mavericks player walked by. “Hey,” Kyle said. “That’s Dante Exum!”
Exum is another longshot success, an Australian basketball phenom who was drafted young and then blew out his knee and now, after a decade, is finding his first success in the NBA as a bench role player. His is not a name, much less a face, many ten-year-olds would recognize. He doesn’t even play on Kyle’s favorite team. “That’s the kind of fan he is,” Culbert Lu said. “Exum overhears him, turns around, and gives him a huge smile. Like, this kid recognizes me!”
Kyle got a fistpump from Chris Paul, the famed “point god” who he models his own game after. The players went back to their lockeroom for final pregame prepartions and Saleh came to meet with the Lu family. Together, they went to the owner’s private suite, where in addition to being surprised by the great array of snacks, Kyle was surprised by the owner himself. Lacob told Kyle he’d be his special guest and sit courtside with himself and Saleh.
“It was cool, getting surprised by the owner himself,” Kyle said.
Culbert had known in advance but had bought a third ticket, next to the seats Saleh had given he and his wife, good seats but not courtside.
“Don’t feel like you have to babysit Kyle the whole game,” he told Saleh. “We can just pick him up, first quarter, halftime, whatever.”
“We’ll be fine,” Saleh said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Kyle sat mostly on the edge of his seat. Saleh recalled they talked game throughout, but more than anything, after all these super mature emails and basketball conversations with Kyle, he finally got to see the kid.
“I thought he saw the game pretty well,” Saleh said. “But more than anything, I think at that point, he was just starstruck. Trayce came over and said ‘Whatsup’ and signed his hat, and we had a couple other players come over. It was cool.”
The Warriors lost as superstar Luka Donicic put on a show, scoring 39 points, dishing 10 assists, and grabbing 8 rebounds.
“We were just sitting there having a good time,” Saleh said. “Kyle was excited, having fun watching the game, watching Luka courtside kicking our ass.”
Jackson-Davis was the silver lining for the Warriors. He started, and scored 17 points and grabbed 9 rebounds.
“Kyle told me Trayce was his favorite player,” Saleh said. “And I am like, ‘I wonder why that is?’”
Saleh said his entire experience with Kyle has been brought him back to his own source of motivation, that pure love of the game that has made the likes everybody from Bob Myers to Dante Exum accomplish unlikely things.
“I don’t know exactly what it was that caught Bob’s eye,” he said, referencing that first email from Kyle to Myers, who has since retired from the Warriors. “Then he sent it to me, and I went through it – the kid is just awesome. There’s something about it that is motivational, or something that just makes you feel good. You want to just go out there and do your job, and Kyle has such a passion for it. You know, it just makes us feel lucky, too.”
People like Saleh and Myers are perhaps fortunate for the perch they’ve gained in the game they love, but it’s also a percerious perch. A few bad seasons and they are gone. So the fun of the game can drain away amid the stress. Then a ten year old kid helps give them back their sense wonder.
“When I was a kid, like a lot of my friends, we wanted to be astronauts,” Saleh said. “Stuff like that usually doesn’t pan out. Because I don’t know anything about astrophysics. But Kyle, he’s putting in the work right now, which is so refreshing. And it’s so great to get an email and a response and then get to know an amazing kid and a great family. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong when people hit me up on Linkedin. But this was so much different.”
During the initial interview with the Warriors, Kyle was asked if he plays video games like NBA2K.
“Sure,” he told them.
Then they asked him what postion he liked to play in the games.
“Commissioner,” he said.
Saleh said nothing would surprise him about Kyle’s future. He plans to keep in touch, and keep him working with the Warriors.
“This kid is going places,” he said.
Candice Lu said the Warriors organization has continually amazed her.
“For them to open up their world to him in the way they have – like, he geinuinely believes he belongs, and as parent, to see that kind of confidence from a kid, it’s just such a blessing,” she said. “And it’s paving a way for him, just the confidence he has.”
“He is a confident kid, but also humble,” Culbert said.
Kyle has told very few of his classmates at Pacific Elementary about his NBA adventure.
“I’ve told a couple of my friends,” he said. “But I don’t want to be a jerk about it.”
Culbert said the whole story is kind of an American Dream.
“I was a son of immigrants,” he said. “They didn’t really know that much about putting their kids in sports and all that. I had to learn on my own. Kyle has had the benefit of that. And my wife is a big athlete, so he’s grown up in a different cultural or family dynamic, and been exposed to it from a very, very early age.”
Kyle’s sister, Kelsey, is likewise gifted. She’s a freshman at Mira Costa who is a dancer and a choreographer.
“She’s popular in her own right,” Culbert said. “And she is extremely supportive of him.”
Candice Lu sees a moral in the tale of how her son came to be a Warrior.
“I’ve always been a big believer that in life things can happen,” she said. “I’ve always imprinted that upon him. We lay down with him, still, sometimes at night. He likes to talk so much. And I told him, ‘If nothing happens, nothing happens. You still have this awesome story. But what if it did? Just put yourself out there. Worst case scenario, nothing changes. But best case, oh my God, so many cool things could happen to you.’ And then it did.”
“It’s just a reminder: go try things. Especially when you are this young. Your whole life is ahead of you. Try for things that you might think are impossible. You never know.” ER
