Kerr waiting for those 5 good days
At times during the regular season, Kevin Durant glanced at the Warriors’ bench to see head coach Steve Kerr, grimace on his face, staring at the floor.
Durant initially assumed Kerr was frustrated with a defensive lapse or rushed shot. It wasn’t until later, when the All-Star forward glanced back at the bench after a big play, that he began to realize Kerr wasn’t well.
“He’d be the same way,” Durant recalled after practice Wednesday.
A master communicator, Kerr is adept at putting others at ease. Now, even as he takes an indefinite hiatus from the sideline to seek a solution to his chronic pain, Kerr is peppering his players with a singular reminder: It has always been their team, not his. His reduced role shouldn’t hurt
their chances of winning an NBA championship.
Still, the question of when Kerr will return to in-game coaching hangs over Golden State as it prepares to face the winner of a Jazz-Clippers series that Utah leads 3-2. Kerr missed practice Wednesday, and according to a report by NBC Sports Bay Area, he is consulting with specialists at Stanford Medical Center. The Warriors will let Kerr’s health dictate when he re-joins the bench.
“The idea is that, if he’s healthy enough to coach, he coaches,” general manager Bob Myers said in an interview Wednesday afternoon with 95.7 The Game. “There has to be a string of days. For you to throw yourself back in the fire, it has to be, ‘I’ve had a good three days. I’ve had a good five days,’ and you don’t see that changing.”
It is an approach Kerr took last season, when he missed the first 43 games. Kerr stayed as active as he could, stopping by practice and reviewing game plans with then-acting head coach Luke Walton. But Kerr’s long-term health, not his job, remained the priority.
Over a five-day period before he announced his break from the sideline Sunday, Kerr’s symptoms took a significant turn for the worst. Most concerning to him was that the head and neck pain he was enduring was unlike anything he had ever experienced. In the Warriors’ Game 2 win over Portland in the first round, Kerr was in such a haze that he broke NBA rules by removing his suit jacket.
On Monday, two days after he watched Game 3 from the team hotel, Kerr attended morning shoot-around and watched Game 4 from the visiting locker room. Brown’s primary objective is maintaining status quo, a goal made easier by the all-inclusive environment Kerr helped foster. The two meet daily. Whenever Brown has a question about the substitution pattern or game plan, he doesn’t hesitate to shoot Kerr a text message.
“Just being here a year, and having the veterans that we have and the staff that we have, and the communication that we’ve had from jump street has made it, in my opinion, a seamless transition,” said Brown, who guided Golden State to wins over the Trail Blazers in games 3 and Game 4. “Without all that, I don’t know that it’d be as seamless.”
More than overseeing practices and substitution patterns, Brown is tasked with helping players handle the emotional toll of Kerr’s absence. This is a man who, over his three years in Oakland, has become as much a friend and mentor to his players as he is a coach. While pursuing the franchise’s second NBA title in three years, those close to him are wracked with what-ifs about Kerr’s health.
“This stuff doesn’t matter, man,” Durant said of basketball. “We want him healthy for the rest of his life. That’s what our main concern is. We don’t want him healthy just so he can coach us in the playoffs. We want him healthy so he can live an everyday life as normal as he can. We’re all praying for him.”
Perhaps no one within the organization feels Kerr’s struggle as intensely as Myers. Last season, the two bonded over shared adversity. While Kerr navigated his health concerns, Myers grieved his brother-in-law, who was killed by a boulder while hiking Mount Kilimanjaro in September 2015.
“I can’t wait, guys, until he feels good,” Myers, his voice cracking, said in his radio interview Wednesday. “That’ll be a great day.”