In June 2009, two days before the NBA draft, Warriors general manager Larry Riley received a tip from what he calls “a pretty reliable source” that, if true, would be huge for his team.
At the time, the Warriors were mired in a dark era. Other than a blip in 2007, Golden State had missed the postseason every year for the better part of two decades. “I felt like we had to hit on that draft pick,” says Riley.
In preparation, they’d ranked the players. At No. 1: consensus top pick Blake Griffin of Oklahoma. At No. 2, Davidson’s Stephen Curry. Riley knew the Knicks also liked Curry.
Fortunately for the Warriors, they picked seventh, one spot ahead of New York. What concerned Riley was Minnesota, which held both the fifth and sixth picks and was in the market for a point guard. And if Riley’s source was to be believed, the Timberwolves planned to take not one but two point guards—but neither was Steph Curry. It seemed too good to be true.
On the night of the draft, Riley and the Warriors’ staff watched as Griffin went first. James Harden and Tyreke Evans, both guards, went third and fourth.
“With the fifth pick in the 2009 NBA draft,” David Stern said, “the Minnesota Timberwolves select . . . Ricky Rubio.”
In Oakland, Riley and his team exhaled. They’d also liked Rubio, but not as much as Curry. It was the next pick, No. 6, that mattered.
Then the phone rang. It was the league office, alerting the Warriors they were on the clock.
Riley recalls feeling “tremendous relief,” a weight lifted off his shoulders. They had their man.
From there—well, you know what happened. Curry became Steph Curry. Rubio became a borderline All-Star. And Syracuse’s Flynn lasted three seasons in the league, his career derailed by hip surgery. Looking back, Riley knows better than to gloat. “Steph Curry’s made a lot of us look good.”
Indeed he has. But what about the man on the other side of that draft, the one who took Rubio and Flynn, Minnesota general manager David Kahn?
Everyone makes mistakes in the GM business—the Grizzlies took Hasheem Thabeet at number two in that same draft, after all, and roughly one in four lottery picks ever becomes an All-Star. But few, if any, had their tenure defined by it like Kahn. Despite four years at the helm of Minnesota, and two decades in the NBA orbit, his career has largely been distilled into one night, fairly or not. You’ll see it, right at the top of his Wikipedia entry: “Of most note, in the 2009 NBA draft, he twice passed on drafting Stephen Curry, instead choosing 2 other point guards.”
Regardless of how you feel about Kahn or the rest of his checkered tenure in Minnesota—and people tend to have strong opinions—that seems a bit rough, on a human level. How do you make peace with it—or can you? Are there lessons to be learned? And what, if anything, do you do for a next act when it feels like you’ll always be defined by your last one?
In Kahn’s case, the answer lies a continent away, in a burgeoning basketball market, where he is quietly pursuing an audacious plan.