The Warriors would be lesser champions without Steve Kerr's gift for joy
The Golden State coach has brought unity to team of superstars. They would be severely weakened if his back problems force him out of the game
The most important person on court when the Golden State Warriors won the NBA title again was the man who wept. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much their dynasty is because of Steve Kerr.
Could it last without him?
For all the talk of the Warriors as the NBA’s super villains with two MVPs, four of the game’s top 15 players and a fleet of role-fillers who would be starters on most other teams, Golden State may be the happiest team in pro sports. They win with joy. How many other great champion teams have said contentment was their top motivator? Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls – of whom Kerr was once a part – never claimed love as the key ingredient in hoisting a trophy.
But the Warriors who went 16-1 this postseason, beating Cleveland 129-120 in Monday’s Game 5 of the NBA finals, are unlike any other sports empire. They don’t motivate with anger. They don’t belittle one another. They win because they like who they are. They win because of culture, that’s what makes them so hard to beat. And as long as Kerr stays at Golden State they will remain the league’s best team.
Warriors assistant coach Bruce Fraser, who played college basketball with Kerr at Arizona, explained this well when he told me last year: “Steve is incredibly important and keen at handling situations where he’s able to get what he wants from the players without offending them, without getting into a screaming match.
Fraser added: “Sometimes I’m thinking: ‘He’s got to jump these guys, this is not good’. And the next thing you know he comes in and says something either really positive or very honest and from his heart and articulate and all of a sudden they have turned that problem into something good.”
The obvious reaction to Durant’s signing with Golden State last summer was that he was jumping on the float at the front of the parade. But Durant, who has always been more contemplative and soulful than other superstars, wanted something bigger than a gaudy ring when he joined the Warriors. He had watched the happiness with which they played and he wanted to be a part of it.
The winning just followed.
Few outside the NBA understand how much Kerr matters to the Warriors. How could they? With players like Durant, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green how could Golden State lose? The assumption is anyone could coach them to a championship. Didn’t Luke Walton lead them to a 39-4 start last year and Mike Brown go 11-0 in these playoffs when Kerr was out with back issues? But as brilliant as Walton and Brown were, the foundation that allowed those wins to come was Kerr’s. The aura around the team is his.
Warriors general manager Bob Myers, the man who hired Kerr in 2014 didn’t fully grasp this himself until the middle of the 2015 finals, when at a tense point in the series he walked into a practice in Cleveland’s arena and found players blasting music from speakers, kicking soccer balls and laughing as they threw half-court shots. Instead of pressure there was euphoria. The Warriors weren’t fuming under a dark cloud as any other team would in such a situation, they were practicing to be themselves.
“Sitting in the stands I had this epiphany,” Myers told the Guardian last year. “I said: ‘I get it.’”
Late last night, after Golden State had won their second title in Kerr’s three years with the team, Myers laughed off the label of his team as the NBA’s Death Star.
“We’re still the same guys,” he said. “Kevin Durant is a great guy. He’s a nice guy. Steph Curry is one of the nicest people you will ever meet. I don’t think we were ever that. I think [with] our personalities people kind of embraced it in a funny kind of way. If that’s what they want to call us that’s not really who we are. I think we’re just a great group of people that want to play team basketball and don’t care who gets the credit.”
Kerr’s style works because much like San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich – a Kerr mentor – he doesn’t make the team about himself. He hates being the celebrity coach, grabbing the spotlight, rambling on about his theories. It was telling that during Monday night’s celebration, ESPN’s Doris Burke had to plow through the players celebrating on the stage to get the coach to talk about his team’s victory. Most coaches would have made sure to be her first interview.
That’s why the greatest threat to the Warriors empire is not LeBron James and the Cavaliers or the Spurs or the Celtics or any of the league’s rising teams. The greatest threat to Golden State’s continued dominance is Kerr’s fragile back. He has been in pain since his surgery after the first title in 2014 with the spinal cord fluid leak that forced him off the bench the first three rounds of the playoffs being the latest in a string of agonizing incidents.
“I don’t know if he can do this very much longer,” a Kerr associate recently told The Veritical’s Adrian Wojnarowski. Two weeks ago Kerr himself told the San Jose Mercury News his situation is “unprecedented” and said “We have to figure everything out this summer.”
It’s hard to imagine Kerr pushing through the hurt, twisting his body into airplane seats and running up and down the court in dress shoes 100 nights a year. If the pain persists he will have to leave and when he goes, the string that holds the Warriors together goes too. That isn’t to say Brown can’t take Golden State to more championships. He is an excellent coach. But his way isn’t Kerr’s way. No one’s is.
The Warriors culture is like none in the NBA. It’s still amazing to see the ease with which Durant slipped into a team that had just set a record for wins in a season. Kerr is lucky to have superstars such as Durant and Curry who put the team above themselves, but he is also the coach who gives them their joy.
Without it they are just another team with a lot of good players.
