Kerr-ses! What could’ve been
BLAME Stan Van Gundy.
It’s his fault, honestly. Van Gundy and the Golden State Warriors were close — very close — to an agreement in May 2014, and it seemed like a perfect marriage: the Warriors getting a coach with NBA Finals experience, the coach inheriting a team that sure seemed ready to join the NBA’s elite. There was only one problem:
Van Gundy wanted total control. The Warriors weren’t offering total control. But suddenly, as the negotiation neared an endgame, someone else was: the Detroit Pistons. And so on May 14, Van Gundy signed on with the Pistons for five years and $35 million, and the Warriors suddenly had to turn their attention elsewhere. So they called Steve Kerr. The rest, you might say, is an alternative history even more depressing for Knicks fans to ponder than the one that actually has happened. Kerr, at the time, was nearing a deal with the Knicks. They were offering three years. He wanted four. But it was the Knicks who held the leverage — right until the moment the Pistons decided to anoint Van Gundy their basketball despot. And changed everything.
What would the Knicks have been like if Phil Jackson had been able to close the deal with Kerr — and, just as pointedly, what would Coach Kerr have been like if his first dip into the NBA’s coaching waters had meant working with a backcourt of Jose Calderon and Iman Shumpert instead of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson?
It is impossible to make a case that Kerr made the wrong choice, not with one championship in the books, not with a near miss alongside it, not with the Warriors (despite their current malaise) odds-on favorites to make another run at June again.
And Kerr alone wouldn’t have snapped his fingers and made the Knicks championship caliber, that’s also a given. Assuming Carmelo Anthony still hurt his knee two years ago, Kerr may well have overseen a calamity every bit as dreadful as the one ultimately handed to Derek Fisher.
As always, the most relevant questions revolve around Jackson.
Such as: What if he actually had figured a way to close a deal with Kerr at some point during their own endless negotiation, a dance that could have ended long before the Warriors ever became an option if Jackson had acted with a little more urgency?
In retrospect, we know now that was a terrible harbinger. Jackson’s prime selling point was supposed to be his ability to attract top talent who would want to work with him and his 11 rings. In the years since, he has been unable to even land a meeting with prime free agents LaMarcus Aldridge and Kevin Durant. But after failing to close Kerr, should that really have been a surprise?
Also: What would Jackson have been like as Kerr’s boss? Kerr has excelled at Golden State primarily because he has been his own man, allowed to follow his own instincts. Again: That’s a more helpful commodity when you have a 70-win team that has your back. Fisher — who had coached just as many NBA games as Kerr had when the two men were hired (zero) — was fired the moment he tried to assert himself and stand up to Jackson. Would Phil have been that bold with Kerr?
And, short of that, would he have dared enact the naked emasculation of Kerr’s authority as he so easily has done with Jeff Hornacek? Again, forget Kerr’s remarkable first 2 ½ years as a coach and remember Hornacek already had 213 games as a coach before he took the Knicks job, so he had a 213game head start on Kerr.
Now, Jackson clearly is closer to Kerr than he is to either Fisher or Hornacek, so maybe that would have bought him time even if he had refused to be a spineless acolyte. But as much as Kerr has embraced the Warriors’ free-wheeling ways — which inspired Jackson’s first hysterical dalliance on Twitter, when Kerr’s Warriors lost a playoff game in 2015 and Phil famously asked “how’s it goink?” — it’s impossible to believe he would have taken kindly to Jackson’s hand-on triangle seminars.
You have to wonder if Stan Van Gundy — 109-121 so far in three years as Detroit Despot — ever looks enviously at the roster he’d have had in Oakland. You have to wonder if Phil Jackson watches Kerr work a room now — confident in his coaching, willing to be outspoken about favored social issues — and secretly wonders what might have been. This much is certain: Steve Kerr sleeps like a baby every night. Things couldn’t possibly have worked out
better for him.