OAKLAND — Maybe Joe Lacob and Bob Myers were always destined to join together to build one of the greatest teams in sports history.

Maybe this was where their lives and careers were always headed, maybe there was no possible chance Myers and Lacob would have failed to cross paths, connect and collect trophies.

Maybe this wasn’t just a random meeting and pairing that actually could have gone a thousand different ways.

Except this: Five years ago, when Lacob and Peter Guber had just completed their purchase of the Warriors and Lacob was putting together a new front-office team, he had never heard of Myers, the Danville native who was a successful agent at the time.

Five years ago, Lacob had Larry Riley as his incumbent general manager and was ready to hire just about anybody except Myers.

There was no compelling reason Lacob could have or would have talked to a 35-year-old lawyer and career agent back then, except for one of those magic twists of fate and NBA consequence.

Boston Celtics executive Danny Ainge, who knew Lacob when he was a Celtics minority owner and knew Myers from player negotiations, called the Warriors owner and recommended Myers out of the blue.

“I knew Bob was from Northern California, and I knew he was looking to get out of the business of agenting,” Ainge said in a phone interview recently.

“I thought that Bob and Joe would be a really good fit and a good match. So I called Joe and highly recommended Bob.

“And then Bob and Joe did the rest.”

Myers said he wasn’t running away from the agent business, but he asked his friend Ainge to say something to Lacob because working for the Warriors — and pushing them back to relevance — was always his dream.

Because he had a feeling this could work.

The summary: Lacob eventually hired Myers to be Riley’s assistant G.M. in April 2011, promoted Myers to the full-time G.M. spot 11 months later, then they ushered in a series of moves that helped lift the Warriors to the 2015 championship, and now they’re odds-on favorites for a repeat, with a chance to post the best record in NBA history.

But, as in any monumental origin story, there was a lot more to it than that.

Everything about how Myers and Lacob came together and stayed together is emblematic of this regime’s inherent intelligence, curiosity, boldness and, of course, willingness to take a risk.

With Lacob’s Warriors, it’s always, always, always about risk mixed with serendipity.

Somebody willing to risk everything is set up to catch the luckiest breaks available.

“You know, Joe was scattered,” Myers said of their first formal discussion, in December 2010. “I don’t think I was high on Joe’s list of priorities for that day; which is fine, I didn’t expect to be …

“It was kind of more, ‘Nice to meet you, good luck,’ that type of thing. And then I left. I remember I was talking to my dad … He said, ‘How’d that go?’ I said, ‘He’s a really nice guy, but they’re not hiring me. I have no opportunity there.’ “

‘A risky hire’

Lacob says that at the time he certainly didn’t think hiring an agent with no previous management or scouting experience was the ideal situation. But he knew he liked Myers.

An NBA source confirmed that Lacob also interviewed Danny Ferry (who had recently been fired as Cleveland’s G.M.) and at least one other high-ranking executive.

“I didn’t really like anybody I was meeting,” Lacob said. “And I kept thinking about Bob. But I thought it’d be too much risk. He wasn’t a G.M., he had never worked in operations.

“That’s how I came up with the idea of coming in under Larry and at the time made a somewhat unpopular decision, like a lot of decisions I’ve made, which was to keep Larry.

“I made the decision to bring in Bob as the assistant G.M. and the deal with Bob was — and I had to convince him of this — let’s see how this goes, let’s get to know each other.”

In two years, Lacob told Myers, we’ll know if you will be promoted to G.M. and if it doesn’t work out you can always go back to the agent business.

Would Myers try it? Yes.

“I was very surprised to get that call,” Myers said. “Because from the outside looking in, most owners that purchase a team like he did for the amount that he did don’t take chances on anything that’s not proven. …

“So I’m on the outside looking in, being in the business … I don’t know if ‘gamble’ is the right word, but it was a risky hire, I think, for sure.”

It worked.

Now Myers is in his fourth season as G.M. (with Riley staying on in the scouting department), he was named the 2014-2015 NBA Executive of the Year, and he runs one of the best and most aggressive front offices in sports.

And in retrospect, it perfectly fit into the pattern of Myers’ career — meet somebody, which leads to an opportunity, which leads to new relationships and new opportunities.

Myers was talked into walking onto the UCLA team in 1993 by then-assistant Steve Lavin, who introduced him to coach Jim Harrick, who later introduced Myers to superagent Arn Tellem, who hired Myers and eventually made him his right-hand man.

Somebody who had already tread that path was fully prepared to deal with players, coaches, other executives … and of course, the new, active, risk-taking owner of the Warriors.

“I didn’t talk to a lot of people,” Lacob recalled of his search. “Danny gave me the advice on Bob, or the lead. And honestly I used my own instincts. I’ve hired a lot of people in my life, and I had a vision for what I wanted here.

“That all fit in … You sit there and say, ‘Would I feel comfortable debating every day with this guy? Would it be one of these relationships where he kind of calls me (only) when he wants me to know something?’

“That’s not what would work with this particular owner. Might work with another owner. But I’m too involved. I want to be too involved.”

Adding ‘The Logo’

Shortly after Myers was hired, Lacob and Guber added NBA icon Jerry West as an executive board member, and that seemed to solidify all parts of the front office team, which also included Lacob’s son Kirk and holdover executives Travis Schlenk and Larry Harris.

West and Tellem are longtime friends, which meant West and Myers were already extremely comfortable together.

“I give Peter a lot of credit on the Jerry thing,” Lacob said. “Just the concept — I think he once said to me, ‘He might be a great consultant and adviser to us, but more than anything he’d be a great — and this is a great term — a great cover of darkness.’

“Meaning, if you have Jerry West, you get a little leeway. Me. I get a little leeway. Bob gets a little leeway. Or whoever the G.M. is.

“Because Jerry has the experience and people will assume that he has knowledge and will be giving us guidance. Which is, in fact, what he did.”

Riley and Don Nelson had drafted Stephen Curry in 2009, so that piece was in place.

After the new management group was put together in 2011, the Warriors immediately drafted Klay Thompson, pulled off the March 2012 Andrew Bogut-Monta Ellis trade (largely put together by Riley) and then drafted Harrison Barnes, Festus Ezeli and Draymond Green that summer.

Yes, all that happened within 15 months of Myers’ and West’s arrivals.

And then Myers started on the long groundwork that went into the eventual sign-and-trade deal that landed Andre Iguodala in July 2013.

“How did I decide (Myers) was the guy? Well, I got the chance to work with him for a year before I made that final decision, right?” Lacob said. “So I think I knew what he was and what he wasn’t at that point.

“I think there’s no substitute for intelligence in any job — whether it’s reporter, owner, whatever you are. He is a smart guy. He was a lawyer; 13 years of negotiating contracts. I knew he’d be good at all that.

“But most importantly I loved his people skills and his concepts of what he was interested in building and being a part of and that type of organization. It just all felt right.”

As we sat for our interview in a side office at Oracle Arena, Myers recalled that during one of his first days working for Tellem in the late-1990s, he met Kobe Bryant.

Flash-forward to 2016: Myers noted that in this very same room he recently presented Bryant a huge bottle of wine as a retirement gift.

That’s the path, those are the connections, friendships and relationships that led Myers to the Warriors.

Well, all that and a call to Lacob from Ainge.

“What I appreciate about Bob and it’s what I still value in my and Bob’s relationship even to this day, he’s just really straightforward,” Ainge said. “It’s refreshing to just see someone that you can have honest communication with.

“Even when Bob and I talk about doing deals now, we can be straight to the point — ‘OK, naw, I don’t like your guy,’ ‘I don’t like your guy, won’t do a deal.’ Just easy to deal with. He just has a really good temperament.”

So what are Ainge’s thoughts about recommending Myers now, with the Warriors possibly set for back-to-back titles?

“I love it,” Ainge said. “Two really good people and Steve Kerr obviously is a really good person.

“I look at the Golden State Warriors now on top … It’s just a fact that they are an amazingly talented team with the best player in the NBA right now.

“But I also look at them as just a terrific franchise with good ownership, good management, good coaching and just good people in general.”

Was this fate? At UCLA, Myers’ nickname was “Forrest Gump” because he was always around when great things happened.

But it was a lot more than destiny and good fortune that brought Lacob, Guber, Myers, Curry, West, Kerr, Green, Bogut, Iguodala and everybody else together.

It took hard work, savvy thinking, trust and a lot of ambition; and if you know Lacob and Myers, and how they first got together, you know that they believe this is just the start of it.

Read Tim Kawakami’s Talking Points blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/kawakami. Contact him at tkawakami@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5442. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/timkawakami.