Kerr at top of his game in most-challenging season
Kerr has been at his best in season of challenges
Steve Kerr won’t win the NBA Coach of the Year award this spring, despite his team having the best record in the league for the third straight year, the top offense and the second-best defense. The coaching honor will probably go to Mike D’Antoni of Houston.
But the man who won a championship in his first year of coaching and was Coach of the Year in his second, the guy who reached 200 wins faster than any other coach in NBA history, is doing the best job of his three-season tenure.
“I think I have a better grasp of certain actions on the floor, offensively and defensively,” Kerr said. “Just like anything else in life, when you’ve been doing something for a while, maybe you get
“I think he’s grown by leaps and bounds. He’s become a good defensive mind.” Ron Adams, Warriors assistant coach, on Steve Kerr
better.
“I know a lot more than I did in the first year.”
Though “challenge” is a relative term, especially when compared with the dysfunction of the Warriors past, this has been the most challenging of Kerr’s three years.
The first year was a delightful surprise, when everything seemed touched by magic and there was a freshness to the process. Kerr inherited a relatively complete team, and he was a revelation in his first year as a coach: smart, in touch, pushing all the right buttons and getting his team to respond.
“There was something incredibly innocent about the first year,” Kerr said. “No one thought we were going to win the championship. It was so fresh, so fun.”
Last season, the pressure was on. Kerr’s team set a league regular-season record with 73 wins and lost the championship on the last possible day of the season. He won the coaching award, though it came with an asterisk because assistant Luke Walton coached the first 43 games (and won 39 of them) as Kerr dealt with complications from a pair of back surgeries.
It all felt like Part II of Kerr’s first season, with a highly motivated intact team that knew how to play under its coach.
“It was just a continuation,” Kerr said.
This season has been different. Kerr stresses than any coach in the world would like to be in his shoes, getting his team to adapt to a star of Kevin Durant’s level. But it did present some challenges in a game with big personalities and only one basketball. Kerr had to get the Warriors players and system to absorb Durant. He had to get Durant to buy in to the Warriors. (“He wants to play 48 minutes every night,” Kerr said recently, “so I have to tell him that’s not allowed.”)
After adapting to Durant, Kerr then had to adapt to not having Durant, after the forward injured his knee in late February. In addition, the role players have changed dramatically. The Warriors lost starters Andrew Bogut and Harrison Barnes plus key contributors Marreese Speights, Leandro Barbosa and Festus Ezeli. They added Zaza Pachulia, David West, rookie Patrick McCaw and Javale McGee, players with vastly different skill sets. Kerr has a new bench coach in Mike Brown. He faced a wildfire of controversy over resting his starters in San Antonio.
Figuring out rotations and minutes, pace and rest has been more of a puzzle for Kerr this season.
“I think there have been challenges,” said Ron Adams, the veteran of the coaching staff. “But they’ve all been pretty nice challenges.”
Adams has been in the league since 1994 and has seen all it has to offer. And Kerr continues to impress him.
“He came at this with a really interesting background that allowed him to exercise some coaching ideas that were pretty unique,” Adams said. “Joyful play. Mindfulness. Not the normal jargon. It’s mental, more emotional, more spiritual in a certain sense.”
Adams said that one of Kerr’s greatest strengths is his communication skill.
“He’s always been a great messenger — the most skilled guy I’ve worked with, in that regard,” Adams said. “His messages are thoughtful and practical and they’re not tawdry, or full of BS. It’s present and real.”
Adams said part of Kerr’s talent is his incredible recall — be it a line from a movie, a basketball anecdote that applies or the lyrics to a ditty from “Hamilton.”
“One of the reasons he’s been highly successful is he asks the opinion of players and follows their lead in many cases,” Adams said. “To do that you have to be a very secure and confident person. It exhibits a level of understanding that a lot of people don’t have. I think the pro athlete, especially in basketball, really appreciates that.”
Those nuances of coaching don’t show up in the box scores, but they are critical to building a culture, a trust and a team ethos that has sustainability.
“I think he’s grown by leaps and bounds,” said Adams, a defensive guru. “He’s become a good defensive mind. That comes with watching and observing. From my standpoint that’s been good to see, he sells our defense a lot more to the players.”
Kerr’s growth and skill as a coach are all the more impressive because of what he is going through personally, since his botched back surgery in the summer of 2015. He doesn’t like to talk about it, or draw any attention to it, but everyone around Kerr knows that he is in pain and having to manage his discomfort on a daily basis.
“The story to me, the tough thing, is that Steve is still not feeling 100 percent,” Adams said. “He loves this organization, he is a social person, yet on a daily basis he can’t fully enjoy it because of how he’s feeling. I feel sad about that. The moments of joy are many and that helps him push through it.
“But he’s not the Steve of two years ago.”
Not physically. But, as a coach, he’s even better than he was two years ago.
And if he stays at it, could he be one of the greats, up there on a pedestal with his own mentors?
“Why not?” said Adams. “He’s off to a pretty good start.”