Talkin’ hoops with Kerr, Jackson
Steve Kerr and Phil Jackson. Twenty championship rings between them (six shared from their time together with the Chicago Bulls). A combined 1,420 regular-season coaching wins. One Hall of Famer, one Hall of Famer-to-be.
They sat down together recently to talk shop, and don’t you wish you could have been a fly on the wall?
No need for that. The conversation was recorded (and moderated) by Kit Rachlis, a senior editor for The California Sunday Magazine. Rachlis began by asking what advice Jackson had for Kerr in pursuing a championship threepeat.
“You have to allow your players to feel their way back into the game, because they’ve been stretched,” Jackson told Rachlis. “I thought last year Steve’s team showed the wear and tear of those past years.”
Then Jackson posed a question to Kerr: “What strategies have worked for you and what strategies have not ... during your team’s run?”
“I can tell you one that did not work for me was when I blasted the team publicly last season,” Kerr said. “We had four or five bad games in a row where I felt our effort was basically nonexistent. I let them have it, both in the locker room and then with the press, right after the game in Indiana. And that didn’t work. Our players were not happy. My assistant coaches came to me, and they said, ‘You got to pull that one back.’ ”
Kerr told Rachlis that one of the things he learned from Jackson was injecting humor into the tedious chore of watching game film by “editing stuff in from movies.” Kerr recalled a 2-on-1 on which Draymond Green was dribbling down the middle while Steph Curry ran to the 3-point line.
“Draymond passes up a dunk and throws it to Steph,” Kerr said, “and Steph misses the 3-pointer. What we decided on the next day at practice was to show a video on playing blackjack. It was about splitting 10s and the audio says, “Never, ever split 10s. Why would you ever give up a winning hand just to try to get two better ones? The guys loved it.”
Jackson was intrigued by the Warriors’ signing of DeMarcus Cousins, “a very volatile player who’s very talented and a surprising addition to your team. On the Bulls we had someone similar — Dennis Rodman. Both feel like they’re picked on by referees and officials and the league and so forth. Draymond Green’s a little like that, too. It gets into a little bit of an attitude.”
Jackson said he had a sports psychologist do what he called mindfulness training with the Bulls.
“It’ll be an intellectual challenge that our core players, I think, will really enjoy,” Kerr said of the addition of Cousins. “It’ll look different. It’ll feel different, and I think they need that.”
Both coaches were asked about their interest in social causes.
“Steve has taken up the call about guns,” Jackson said. “We had a player on the Bulls, Scottie Pippen, who was found with a gun in his car. So the team had a talk about guns and about why. Are you afraid? Are you being protective? Guns bring their own violence. We talked about Ghandi’s influence, of the value of nonviolent protesting, or carrying a different energy into a conflict, that when you come into a conflict with anger, you’re going to be met, more likely, with anger. That’s part of our game: to come in with anger but turn it in a different way.”
“Times have changed, and the times call for it,” said Kerr, who recalls reading about “Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Lew Alcindor and some of the great black athletes joining forces in the civil rights cause — John Carlos and Tommie Smith. I think right now it just feels like people need to be speaking because there’s a lot going wrong and a lot that needs to be corrected and worked on.”