Almost 12 months after it looked like his career might be over, JaVale McGee had perhaps his most significant moment as an NBA player in Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals on Saturday.
Starting in place of the injured Zaza Pachulia, McGee scored 16 points in 13 minutes, and proved wrong the many doubters who scoffed at his ability to be an impact player in a high leverage situation.
A long shot to make the team in training camp, McGee has been a pleasant surprise for Golden State all season. So much so, that general manager Bob Myers told Gary and Larry on Monday afternoon that the veteran center has exceeded his wildest expectations.
“With JaVale, if you had’ve told me at the start of the year that he’s going to start in the Western Conference Finals, and score 16 points, even us, and I’m being honest, no way did we think that,” Myers said.
McGee joined Zaza Pachulia and David West as three newcomers tasked with manning the center position after the departures of Andrew Bogut and Festus Ezeli last offseason. The three-man rotation has been a resounding success, largely due to the trio’s complimentary skill sets, allowing the Warriors to mix and match depending on what the situation calls for.
“You look at the playoffs and you look at the style of play and you look at the Spurs and the Rockets, you look at all these teams,” Myers began. “I think…when you construct a team in our league, you need stars, and those are the hardest guys to get. But assuming you get fortunate enough to grab, and we’ve been more than fortunate to grab a couple of those guys, then it becomes the rest of the roster, and how many guys you can find to play fast, to play slow, to play out of the mid-post like a David West, to be a vertical spacer like JaVale McGee. And really what you have to do, it’s like a puzzle. You don’t need three JaVale McGee’s that are athletic and lob catching guys, and you also don’t want three David West’s at the center position that don’t give you that option. So what you do is you try to find three guys that compliment each other, not compliment each other on the floor, but compliment each other as far as different skill sets.
“If it’s our team, you’d say, well, they’re very disparate these guys. You look at Zaza, David and JaVale — completely different games. Now Zaza and David resemble each other a little bit, but even David is much more comfortable from 15-18 feet. You don’t see Zaza shooting that shot a lot, and JaVale is an outlier with what everybody loves to watch him do. Some guys in the NBA can do all those three things, and those are the guys that make a ton of money, but we don’t have a ton of money to spend, because we spent it elsewhere. So you try to piece it together.”
Listen to the full interview below. To hear Myers’ comments on McGee, skip to the 11:20 mark.