K done it before
Warriors head coach earned Game 7 chops as key reserve with Bulls’ 1998 title team
OKLAHOMA CITY — Golden State’s 73-victory regular season prompted much conjecture about how the Stephen Curry-led Warriors would have stacked up against the Michael Jordan-powered Chicago teams that once won 72. In 1998, the Bulls won the last of their six NBA championships with Jordan, but only after finding themselves in circumstances similar to what these Warriors are now facing.
That spring, the top-seeded Bulls were taken to a seventh game by the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals. Between Games 6 and 7, the Bulls’ coach, Phil Jackson, huddled with his players and told them not to fear failing. “The fear is not losing,” Jackson told them. “The fear is not producing the effort needed.”
Steve Kerr, now the Warriors’ second-year coach, was an important reserve on that Bulls team, and he remembers distinctly what happened next. Jordan spoke up and said something to the effect of “forget that,” only his language was too blue for black-and-white newsprint.
His teammates got the point. Behind sparkling performances from Luc Longley, Toni Kukoc and Kerr, who contributed 11 points off the bench, the Bulls handed the Pacers a 5-point defeat at the United Center in the seriesdeciding game and went on to beat the Utah Jazz in six games in the NBA finals in Jordan’s last rodeo with the Bulls.
Eighteen years later, it is the defending champion Warriors’ turn to navigate a Game 7 conference final. Unlike the 1998 Bulls, the Warriors are in the early stages of dynasty-building. Some thought their foundation was crumbling after they lost three of the first four games in this series to a surging Oklahoma City Thunder. But since then, Golden State has dramatically held on, and it can still validate its historic regular-season performance by winning this round, and then, a second straight championship.
After winning Games 5 and 6 against the Thunder, including Saturday night’s instant classic here, the homebound Warriors will also have momentum and the crowd on their side Monday night at Oracle Arena.
However, Kerr said, “We’ve got to play a great game. Our crowd’s
not going to be enough.”
It will be Kerr’s first Game 7 as a head coach, but he has experience as a player that he can fall back on. During a pro career that spanned a decade and a half, he appeared in 128 postseason games as a backcourt contributor, including a few Game 7s. Kerr’s introduction to the most dramatic of series curtain closers was the 1992 Eastern Conference semifinals, when the Cleveland team he played for turned back Boston. Two years later, Kerr, by then a Bull, appeared in another in the second round of the 1994 postseason. With Jordan on his baseball sabbatical, Chicago lost to the New York Knicks.
The 1998 Game 7 against the Pacers made a lasting impact on Kerr. In particular, he took to heart Jackson’s directive about approaching the challenge with maximum effort and minimal fear.
And sometimes you have to fail — as Kerr did with the Cavaliers in 1992 — to learn how to succeed. The Warriors’ core of Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green was on the losing end of a Game 7 in the first round of the 2014 playoffs against the Los Angeles Clippers, after which Mark Jackson was fired as the coach, paving the way for Kerr’s hiring.
Then came a championship, and now, another Game 7.
“Have another opportunity to get the job done,” Curry said late Saturday night after he contributed 29 points, including consecutive 3-pointers in the final minutes, to erase what remained of the Thunder’s 8-point fourthquarter lead. With 14 seconds left, Curry raised his hands and gave the sellout crowd at Chesapeake Energy Arena a seven-finger salute.
“If we thought tonight was hard, Game 7 is going to be even tougher,” said Curry, who also had 10 rebounds and 9 assists. “We can’t expect just because we’re at home we can just show up and win.”
Given his family’s history in seventh games, Curry ought to consider hanging garlic bulbs from his locker to ward off evil spirits. A Toronto Raptors team, coached by Lenny Wilkens, took the Philadelphia 76ers to a Game 7 in the 2001 Eastern Conference semifinals but lost by a point when Vince Carter missed a last-second jump shot off an inbounds pass from Curry’s father Dell.
Stephen Curry, who was 13 at the time, watched the game from home on TV.
“I’m still mad at Lenny Wilkens for making him the takeout man on the last shot,” he said of his father’s role in the final play. “But it’s cool just being around the game and understanding the hype and the sense of urgency in a Game 7 situation.”
Dell Curry, who was at Saturday night’s game to watch his son, reflected later on what lies ahead Monday night. “There’s a little more pressure,” he said. “You can’t think about that. You have to treat it as another playoff game: No panic. Trust each other. Make big shots. Don’t get too high or too low.”
His son contributed a few more bullet points in his postgame news conference: “Be physical. Be smart. Execute our game plan.”
Curry could have been summarizing the play of his teammate Andre Iguodala in the final 2 minutes 6 seconds of Game 6. Iguodala recorded a layup, two steals and an assist in that span, prompting Kerr to proclaim him as “kind of the unsung hero.”
Iguodala, who was named the most valuable player of the NBA finals last spring, is the Warriors’ philosopher king.
“We have a lot of believers on this team,” he said Saturday night. “We say the course and the process is the journey and you’ve got to enjoy each moment and not look ahead, not look back.”
Last year, the Warriors dispatched the Houston Rockets in five games to advance to the finals. This seesaw series, however stomach-roiling, has given the Warriors a moment worth savoring.
“I’m excited to go back home for Game 7,” Green said, “because, man, to be in this situation, people would die for this.”
He added: “They’re going to come out and battle. We’re going to come out and battle.”
And Kerr shall lead them. After Saturday’s game, which included 11 lead changes, he ran into Rick Welts, the Warriors’ president and chief of operations, in a hallway.
“That was kind of fun,” Kerr told Welts.
Kerr used the same word again in his postgame news conference as he talked about Game 7s. Why not? As Jackson more or less told him 18 years ago: Embrace the moment and the results will take care of themselves.