Kerr’s record hard to match
BOSTON — He hit a championship-winning shot with Michael Jordan. He calls the shots for Stephen Curry.
From clutch to coach, Steve Kerr has done it all for some of basketball’s biggest winners. Any team that can claim to be a dynasty across the last 30 years of the NBA has some link to the Warriors’ coach.
Now back in Boston, the winning Warrior was a victory away from a ninth NBA championship.
Up 3-2, the Warriors had a chance to close out the Celtics in the NBA Finals on Thursday night.
Game 6 ended too late for this edition.
If Kerr wins another title, he will credit Curry and Klay Thompson, just as he did as a player with Jordan and Scottie Pippen, or Tim Duncan and David Robinson, when trying to explain his success.
“Just hanging around the right people,” he said with a smile. “You hang around superstars long enough, you’re going to get some residual success falling your way.”
There’s more to it than that, of course. Talent may take a team to the top, but staying there — and then getting back again after being knocked down — demands more than that. It requires understanding the personnel on the court and the personalities in the locker room.
It means thinking the game as well as playing it, and Kerr does that with the best of them.
“The man’s knowledge for the game is second to none,” Thompson said.
Kerr hasn’t won quite like Bill Russell, the Celtics Hall of Fame center who pocketed 11 rings as a player. Nor as much as Phil Jackson, who won 11 of his own as a coach.
Yet, when it comes to combining winning as a player and a coach, few have done it better than Kerr.
He won five titles in uniform with the Bulls and Spurs. Add in three as the Warriors’ boss, and he’s the first person in NBA history to win at least three titles as a player and a coach.
Throw in a couple stints as an analyst for TNT around his time as GM of the Suns, and Kerr has seen NBA basketball from almost every angle.
“I mean, Steve has had such an incredible, unique career, from player to coach, GM. He just knows how to jell talent together,” Thompson said. “Then he draws from his playing days, which is really cool to hear and talk about, playing with Mike and Scottie, the Twin Towers in San Antonio.”
Kerr wasn’t a player like those Hall of Fame talents. A second-round pick in the 1988 draft, he started only 30 games in his career. He never averaged double figures in any of his 15 seasons, sticking around that long by being a good teammate and a better shooter.
Being a role player doesn’t mean Kerr didn’t have a big role.
Curry may be considered the greatest outside shooter ever, but it’s Kerr whose 45.4% career mark from 3-point range is tops in NBA history. He knocked down the jumper to secure the Bulls’ 1997 championship.
The confidence Kerr showed on the floor then is the same he demonstrates in the huddle now, a resolve that Draymond Green says makes the Warriors feel “invincible.”