Kerr’s influence can’t be overstated
OAKLAND, Calif. — The debate rages over who is most responsible for the Golden State Warriors reaching their fifth consecutive NBA Finals, which begin Thursday.
Is it Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant or Draymond Green? Another name merits consideration:
Steve Kerr.
Kerr won’t be among the finalists for NBA Coach of the Year, partly because his team is loaded with talent and expected to win big. But if the Warriors claim their third consecutive
NBA title, there will be increasing recognition that Kerr did far more than steer the ship on another pleasure cruise.
And if the Warriors fall short? There have been struggles, conflicts and challenges for the coach this season. Some revolve around Durant’s present and future with the team, but other issues include injuries and episodes of the blahs. The Warriors sometimes seemed like poets bored with penning odes to the same old Grecian urn — or Larry O’Brien Trophy.
Whatever the degree of difficulty one ascribes to Kerr’s collective challenges this season can be multiplied by his literal headaches. He never discusses this, but the severe headaches that began after lower-back surgery on a ruptured disk in the summer of 2015 persist on some significant level. The headaches caused him to sit out 43 regularseason games that season and 11 playoff games the next season. He has not missed a game since.
“I think this may have been his toughest year, with all the dynamics, everything combined,” said Bruce Fraser, Warriors assistant coach and Kerr’s longtime friend. “We’d finally start to get going and something would happen, whether it would be an injury or blowup. There’s no one better that I’ve seen in dealing with that kind of stuff than he is.
“Steve likes challenges, but emotional challenges are trickier. You’ve got to get individuals to sort of buy in to the whole . ... A lot of NBA teams deal with this, so this isn’t unique to the business, but I think (turmoil) was unique to our team’s culture.”
Kerr, 53, steered the Warriors’ ship through a sea of icebergs — dodging some, bouncing off others — and the Warriors will sail into the NBA Finals against the Raptors or Bucks as the betting favorite. Anything short of another championship will be viewed as a failure.
That’s pressure, but it’s nothing like the pressure Kerr felt in 2014 as a rookie coach. He arrived with notebooks crammed with ideas and a head filled with doubts. Would his schemes work on the court like they work on paper? Would his superstars buy in, or freeze him out of the job he had been dreaming of since college?
Coaching turning point
Kerr’s breakthrough came early that first season, before facing the Lakers in Los Angeles, with four days between games.
“I told the guys, ‘If you play well and win tonight, I’ll give you the next two days off,’ which is really rare in the NBA. You would have thought I just offered each of them a million-dollar bonus for winning the game,” Kerr said.
They won by 21 points, improving to 8-2. Kerr spent the next two days in San Diego with his wife, surfing and soaking it in.
“Beautiful day, I’m sitting out there on my board, this would have been early November, and I’m thinking about our team,” he said. “Everybody’s happy, we’re just crushing teams. I just thought, OK, this is actually working. And I get to surf today.”
So coaching an NBA team can be a day at the beach. But there is always a tsunami just over the horizon. Some of the storms have revolved around Green and Durant. On several occasions Durant took exception to something Kerr said, most notably in the opening round of the playoffs. When Durant suddenly cut back on his shot attempts, Kerr said he wanted Durant to be aggressive. That was followed by his “I’m Kevin Durant” declaration, which sounded like, Don’t tell me how to play basketball.
Kerr’s challenge-filled season raises the topic of the NBA’s unwritten Five-Year Rule: When a coach has been with a team five seasons, players start tuning him out. Kerr is aware of the Five-Year Rule, having played 15 seasons in the NBA for six teams.
“I think it’s generally true, that five years is about the time a (coach’s) run will last, but I also think there are exceptions,” Kerr said, citing his former coaches, Phil Jackson in Chicago and Gregg Popovich in San Antonio. “A lot of that is based on your personnel, and if you’re lucky enough to have star players who are really high-character guys like we have, I think it can go longer than five years.”
Kerr signed a five-year contract extension last summer that kicks in next season. He and his wife, Margot, bought a home in San Francisco, to be nearer the team’s new arena. His ridiculously good coaching record — a .785 winning percentage in regular season and an NBA best .758 in the playoffs (25 or more games) — suggest he would have few more worlds to conquer should the Warriors win these Finals. It would be his fourth NBA title in five seasons, to go with the five championship rings he won as a player.
But Kerr is less about numbers and jewelry, and more about coaching. He plans to coach out his current contract, at least.
“Who the hell knows what’s going to happen in five years,” Kerr said, “but I love what I do, I enjoy every day, being around the players, the people in the organization. I love the rhythm and the routine of the NBA, I love having the summer off. It’s a great life, now that my kids are older.”
But coaching success and sanity are day-to-day propositions, and Kerr’s challenge is to make himself heard by his players in the Finals, and to have something worthwhile to say.
Five-Year Rule
“It’s almost impossible for a head coach’s voice not to get old,” Fraser said. “I think the one thing that saves Steve from the destruction of (the Five-Year Rule) is that the players believe in him. Even if his voice is old, there’s a trust there based on our pasts, and based on the way he’s humble and he’s honest and he’s smart.
“And they know that, so even if they’re tired of his voice, at the end of the day, when it comes to crunch time, that’s the voice they’re going to listen to, and they still trust it. That matters most.”