Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Locked-on Warriors. I'm West Goldberg, Warriors beat writer for the Mercury News.

Make sure to follow Lockdown Warriors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get podcasts for episodes every day, Monday through Friday.

I'm joined on today's episode by Warriors president and CEO Rick Welts, who will be stepping down from his role at the end of the season.

Welts joined me to talk about the future

of the Warriors as a business, his thoughts on Steph Curry, and then share stories from a long

and decorated career as an NBA executive, including helping create and market the dream team

and NBA All-Star Weekend as we know it. Welts is one of those guys who you always come away

impressed by and seems to

be thinking 10 years down the road all the time. So I think you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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So the last time you and I spoke actually, it was last year, I spoke to you about a story I was working on about the 10-year anniversary of Joe and Peter buying the team.

And obviously, this is, you know, the 10th year of you being in this president role.

And you'll be stepping down at the end of the year.

I just wonder if is the reason for you're stepping down just because it was a nice round number of 10 years?

Or was there, or what was kind of the reasoning there for you?

Nothing that well brought out, Wes. No, this is, we had, we, we sat down a couple years ago and talked about like my desire

that, uh, at the right point in time, I wanted to step away, uh, feeling like we, we had a really

...