Bob Myers didn’t definitively say he doesn’t want the Lakers job

There was a lot of speculation from quite a few really informed people this week that Golden State Warriors team president and general manager Bob Myers might be a real candidate to replace Magic Johnson with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Monte Pool of NBC Sports Bay Area had some fun with that idea with Myers after a recent practice, and Myers’ reaction leaves plenty open to interpretation:

Me: What are you doing here today?

Bob: What do you mean?

Me: Shouldn’t you be having lunch with (Lakers controlling owner) Jeanie Buss?

Bob: Oh, right. Almost forgot. (Looks at his watch) I’m supposed to meet her at 2.

Myers then laughed a laugh that suggests he’s not eager to go anywhere anytime soon, even if there are days and nights when he probably wouldn’t mind.

Now, some people have read that very differently than I did. The headline of the piece is “Bob Myers laughs at idea of leaving Warriors for Lakers, and with good reason,” which seems to be the angle that most other sites went with. That is a pretty opinionated headline that Myers simply laughing at his own joke about taking a job interview with the Lakers doesn’t seem to necessarily support. Unless Myers told Poole something on background that left him so confident Myers has no plans to leave the Warriors for the Lakers — not out of the realm of possibility — this was hardly a “no,” and we’re reading a lot into Poole’s interpretation of Myers’ laugh.

This still doesn’t mean that Myers isn’t leaving the Warriors for the Lakers by any means. I wrote quite a few reasons why I think that won’t happen last week. That noted, people make jokes to diffuse situations all the time. My fiancée says I do it to a fault. Myers laughing — even if a reporter writes that it’s “a laugh that suggests he’s not eager to go anywhere anytime soon” — doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. This is hardly as emphatic a denial as Pat Riley gave about speculation he might be interested in replacing Johnson.

Again, this doesn’t mean that Myers is inbound, or that this reaction makes it more likely he’s coming to the Lakers. It just means that sometimes headlines don’t tell the whole story, and that laughing at his own joke about interviewing for the Lakers’ job isn’t enough publicly available information to rule out Myers for certain yet, no matter how unlikely it seems that he’d leave a gig as plush as the Warriors to try and fix everything that’s wrong with the Lakers.

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