EDITOR'S NOTE: Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob answered questions from Tim Kawakami Thursday night about coach Mark Jackson being a target of an extortion scheme involving Jackson's extramarital affair six years ago.
Question: I know you put the statement out on Mark Jackson's situation today. Where are you personally with Mark on this?
LACOB: Same place as yesterday. We love him as a coach, love him as a person. He's our coach. We stand behind him.
Obviously it's a difficult situation for him that happened to him. All I can tell you is that we didn't know anything about it obviously until recently. Clearly, very surprising. I think he's obviously somewhat embarrassed by it.
But one thing about Mark Jackson, he's a stand-up guy. If you saw his statement, he laid it out and said he made a mistake. You know, six years ago, not anything having to do with the Warriors.
And we didn't know that, certainly had no expectation obviously that something like that ever happened. But he's a great guy, great coach, we're 100 percent behind him.
He'll get through this. He's doing all the right things -- the FBI got involved as you know, they've got the people in custody. It's a pretty crummy situation.
Q: Do you wish you'd known about this?
LACOB: I wish it never happened. I'm sure he does, too. But it did. And that's life. We knew about it as soon as he
told us, basically, not too long ago, obviously when the FBI was getting involved.It's not like he hid it from us. It only happened in late April, something like that, so it's not been that long.
I don't know, the Warriors seem to ... this organization always seems to have bad luck with things like this. Obviously, this organization we're building, we've worked really hard to change the culture, to change everything about this organization, have quality people everywhere, and Mark is a quality guy.
He made a mistake, as he has admitted to. He's owned up to it and moved on.
Q: Is there any worry about a credibility issue -- whether it's in the locker room or in the community? He's the public face of this franchise in many ways.
LACOB: We're moving on, we're going to deal with it. That's for people like you to write about it and his players, if there's a credibility issue that's something he'll deal with.
You've got to look at a man's total body of work in his life. I'm sure you've made some mistakes in your life that you probably wouldn't want to get out in public. Everybody has. It's unfortunate. But he's a really good man and we back up 100 percent. We stand right behind him.
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