After guiding Warriors through their turnaround, how about showing a little respect for Kerr?

Stephen Curry silenced his doubters by winning a scoring title and putting up an MVP-caliber season alongside a team that’s nowhere near the caliber he played with during the Warriors’ salad days.

Will Steve Kerr’s critics give him the same kind of respect?

Because if you thought that Kerr’s success is just a byproduct of a great situation — that he’s just a suit (or, this season, a quarterzip) that’s merely tagging along for the Curry Show, you have been proven wrong over the last few weeks.

Kerr is coaching the hell out of these Warriors. Yes, it took some serious patience, a few tweaks, and, of course, great players taking their games to new heights,

but Golden State has been the best team in the NBA over the last quarter of the season. The Dubs enter today’s play-in tournament game with the defending champion Lakers as equals — a concept that would have been downright inconceivable only a few weeks ago.

And in the process of that turnaround, Kerr has shown just how valuable he is to the Warriors.

Let’s be clear: Kerr was given a mess of a team going into this season. It was a strange mix of champions, veterans, and youngsters; of bigmoney players and guys on league-minimum deals and two-way contracts. There were dueling directions for the team, handed down from on high — win but also develop — and many of the parts Kerr was given did not and likely will never fit together, making both of those directions not achievable.

It wasn’t surprising that the Warriors were 23-27 at the 50-game mark of the season. There had been a few nice stretches of play, but things were clunky and the team lacked an identity.

And to criticize the head coach at that moment was totally justifiable. He’ll be the first to admit that he wasn’t doing a great job.

But if Kerr was at least partially (or, as some fans alleged, fully) to blame for the Warriors’ struggles, he deserves some credit for the Warriors’ strong play as of late.

“Well you guys laughed at me, I kept telling you over the last six weeks that we were gonna go on a run,” Kerr said after the Warriors’ win Sunday. “We could feel our team improving and coming together a couple of months back... we just felt like if we could hang in there, that these last 20 games would be a chance for us to make a real push. I’m happy that I was right, we’ve gotten on a good run, playing at a high level and the guys are having a lot of fun, so it’s good stuff.”

Good vibes and wins? What more could you want from a coach?

Now, there’s no doubt that circumstance forced Kerr’s hand a bit.

But the Dubs have turned what seemed to be adverse circumstances into positive occurrences as of late. The loss of James Wiseman, the team’s only true center, forced the Warriors to embrace smallball. A lateseason injury to Kelly Oubre forced Golden State to tighten their rotation even further and put the ball in Curry’s hands more often.

With a shortened rotation full of shorter players, the Warriors found an offensive identity — they look an awful lot like the Warriors of the past.

And that “top-10 defense” Kerr wanted this season — something I ribbed countless times over the last few months? Well, the Warriors had a top-5 defense this season, and over the final 20 games of the season, they had the best defense in the NBA.

The joke’s on me. Kerr took good and turned it into great when he arrived in Golden State, winning a title in his first year at the helm and starting a modern-day dynasty that “ruined the league” in the process. But coaching a team without a preponderance of talent takes a dramatically different skill set.

Could Kerr build up young players? Could he set a new foundation in San Francisco? Could he mesh the young with the old?

Again, these were fair questions. Kerr had to prove himself this season.

Kerr has two coaching role models — Gregg Popovich and Phil Jackson, arguably the two greatest coaches in the history of the NBA.

But the two men stand as stark contrasts. Popovich is the ultimate pragmatist. He has no unimpeachable style or system. He’ll always make do. Give him a little and he’ll turn into a lot. Give him plenty and he’ll win five titles.

Jackson was the kind of coach who could get the most out of the best and then, against all odds, maintain it. But rebuilds? That’s where he checked out and fled to Montana.

And after the Warriors’ disastrous 2019-20 season, when they finished with the worst record in the NBA, and the start to this campaign, it was fair to wonder if Kerr was the right man to coach this kind of team; if he was more Jackson than Pop and that an escape to his personal Montana — his home in San Diego — was imminent.

Turns out that he’s able to take a little bit from both of his mentors.

Kerr knows that veterans win, but over the last two months, he’s also shown a laudable pragmatism and deft hand when it comes to working with this team, and, in particular, its young players.

Yes, perhaps Kerr should have recognized that they needed to run more pick-and-roll with Curry this season well before they started doing it. Perhaps he should have been more hands-on earlier in the season when it came to calling plays. Perhaps Kelly Oubre should have been on the bench well before he was relegated to a sixth-man role. You can say that Juan Toscano Anderson deserved more run well before he received it, too, or that Wiseman should have been given a real redshirt year, instead of playing a dozen different roles before injuring his knee. And yes, Jordan Poole should have been the second-unit point guard long before he was given the job.

But every coach looks terrible when you’re using hindsight.

The takeaway of this season should really be that Kerr and his staff figured it out and the Warriors were none the worse for wear in the process. (Let’s be honest, they were always going to be a playin team.) In the process, they’ve also set a solid foundation for the future. They know what they are moving forward.

Every team is different, so the requirements of the job are ever-changing, but a coach’s job is to take whatever they are given and make the most out of it — to maximize output.

It was a rocky, winding road, but at the end of the season, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Kerr did just that.

It’s “good stuff.” And while he won’t ask for it, a little bit more credit is warranted. This guy in the quarter-zip is pretty good.