When Joe Lacob made the wildly unpopular decision to fire Mark Jackson as head coach of the Warriors, the future of the franchise depended on whom he next chose to roam the Oracle Arena sidelines. That might sound hyperbolic, but the team was firmly teetering on yet another one of those cliff edges that it had so often plummeted over in years past. Over that 18-year stretch with only one playoff appearance, the team had 11 different head coaches. It’s like a young quarterback whose offensive coordinators keep getting poached by other teams. There’s a constant state of unease and flux, no time to develop chemistry or anything remotely lasting.
Jackson, the 11th in that line of succession, was supposed to break the cycle, but hubris had been his undoing. In an organization that sought to encourage dialogue and hold people accountable as much as lift them up, Jackson preferred his bubble of authority, which was well within his rights. A head coach can run the team as he sees fit, but an owner can choose any head coach he wants. Lacob knew this from every executive board meeting he’d ever attended. Leaders must be allowed to lead, but upper management has to realize when the best move is the most difficult one to make.
Lacob’s next coach had to be a winner. He could not afford to blow this. There had been much offseason turmoil already, and the season was barely over. In addition to Jackson’s departure, the team announced during the series against the Clippers that the original arena plan, which had been announced with so much fanfare two years earlier, had to be scrapped. The new plan still called for an arena in San Francisco but now in the southeastern part of the city, in a more industrial neighborhood and a far cry from the picturesque waterfront views Lacob boasted of back in 2012. It was a setback for the team and a reminder that the process of privately financing a sporting complex with a 10-digit price tag was rife with potential pitfalls.
That was an issue for the future. The head coaching vacancy was far more pressing, but eight days after Jackson was let go, the Warriors made their choice, a man with five championships as a player, one of the most recognizable faces in the NBA, and—of course—not a single second of coaching experience to his name.
• • •
“What should a front office look like?”
The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston has long boasted the smartest forward-looking discussions in the entire industry, and the “Basketball Analytics” panel, which always pulls together some enchanting mix of outspoken coaches and general managers, is a particular high point every year, almost without fail. But the 2014 assemblage, moderated by Grantland writer Zach Lowe, produced one of the smartest basketball-related discussions ever conducted in the public sphere. There was assistant general manager Mike Zarren and head coach Brad Stevens, both of the Boston Celtics, talking at length about the science behind their team’s practice schedule. There was former Miami Heat head coach Stan Van Gundy, who railed against advanced stats that don’t pass the eye test. Also on the dais was former Toronto Raptors and Phoenix Suns general manager Bryan Colangelo, who put real dollar amounts (perhaps $500,000 or more) on how much teams should be investing in their analytics departments.
Rounding out the group was Steve Kerr, an on-air analyst for Turner Sports. As the second of two former Suns GMs on the stage, Kerr was more than qualified to take up Lowe’s question and convey his insights as to how the modern NBA front office structure should operate. “I think what I would be looking for,” Kerr said, “is somebody who can combine a basketball knowledge with the numbers. Somebody with an actual basketball and analytics background could slide right in and now we have easier conversations.”
Kerr told a story from his days in Phoenix. During the 2009–10 season, his final year with the team, Kerr was exploring a way to trade All-Star Amar’e Stoudemire. After he’d tried (and failed) to convince the Warriors to take him for the draft rights to a young Stephen Curry, Kerr was desperate to find a suitor as the trade deadline approached. As part of that process, his staff was trying to identify a potential trade target. One of his charges suggested J. J. Hickson, a 21-year-old power forward in his second season with the Cleveland Cavaliers. As a new addition to the first unit, he’d been playing starter minutes for the Cavs and averaging nine points but had a killer field-goal percentage. Hickson was, according to this Suns employee, shooting better at the rim than Stoudemire. The numbers said so!
Kerr was incredulous. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“No, it’s right here, 65 percent to 62 percent.”
Kerr didn’t buy it. There were few players in the NBA more skilled at cleaning up at the rim, finishing off those pesky three- and four-footers that so many bigs can’t handle with finesse but the sure-handed Stoudemire did. Kerr pulled up a Synergy video of Hickson’s shot attempts that were zero to five feet from the rim. Turns out they were almost all dunks. Hickson wasn’t even trying shots with any distance.
Kerr never forgot the lesson of that impromptu film session. As he told the rapt Sloan crowd, “I would want somebody who could actually look at the numbers and figure out pretty quickly, ‘That number won’t work because it doesn’t apply to Hickson because he doesn’t shoot from two to five. Amar’e’s much better. Let’s move on to a different number.’ There’s so much information but how do you get through it all? I think it would help a lot to have somebody with both backgrounds.”
Colangelo came away impressed. “Steve is clearly multitalented and possesses a rare blend of intelligence, personality, and likeability,” he says. “His cerebral, calm, and confident demeanor makes him an easy guy to talk to and believe in.”
Kerr’s confidence came from doing his homework. For more than a year, he’d been dumping every effective concept and strategy he’d absorbed throughout his long and winding career into a Word document as well as (with the help of a friend) compiling a video library with clips of plays he would install as an NBA coach. By the spring of 2014, Kerr had collected dozens of plays and a smorgasbord of coaching knowledge from some of the game’s brightest minds. He was happy calling games for TNT, but if a coaching opportunity came along that was right for him and his family, Kerr wanted to be ready. By May, he had pieced together a thorough and wide-ranging PowerPoint presentation; one of the first slides was titled “Why I’m Ready to Be a Head Coach.”
In its totality, Kerr’s résumé represented not just a wealth of basketball knowledge gleaned from years of playing under and working alongside some of the most successful coaches in the sport but a culmination of one of the most eclectic lives one is likely to encounter.
Born in Lebanon, Kerr was the third of four children born to Ann Zwicker and Malcolm Kerr. His parents had met a decade earlier at the American University of Beirut, often referred to as the “Harvard of the Middle East.” Malcolm, himself born in Lebanon in October 1931, received his master’s from AUB in 1955. They soon married, and Malcolm earned a doctorate in international relations from Johns Hopkins in 1958. They stayed in Beirut until 1961, when he joined the UCLA faculty and they moved to Southern California.
By that time, Malcolm was on the fast track to establishing his bona fides as one of the world’s leading scholars on Middle East relations. His book The Arab Cold War was considered a landmark publication, and even though the Kerrs technically lived in the United States, they returned to Beirut often. It was during one of these sabbaticals abroad that Stephen Douglas Kerr came along in September 1965, and extended periods of his formative years were spent not just at the Kerrs’ home in Southern California but in such countries as Egypt and Tunisia. While abroad, Kerr was stunned by the poverty one didn’t see growing up in a sleepy surf town like Pacific Palisades. He watched kids play soccer with rocks as goal markers, the ball nothing more than bundled rags. “It made me more compassionate and it also made me appreciate our own country,” Kerr told an interviewer in 2016, “for not only the comforts and the freedom we live in but just for the joy that we were allowed every day. Most people don’t grow up with great joy in their lives; they’re struggling to survive. That struck me pretty hard at a young age.”
With his older brother, John, available to grab rebounds and play catch, Steve fell into sports from a young age. At Palisades High School, Steve was a third baseman and relief pitcher for the baseball team as well as the starting point guard for the varsity basketball squad. And even though Malcolm wasn’t much of a participant himself, save for some one-on-one on the driveway hoop and recreational tennis with friends, he championed Steve’s love of sports. He would keep Arabic readings in his lap to read during the commercial breaks of college football games, and sports references even found their way into his own academic writings, no matter how heady the topic. “In the good old days,’’ Malcolm wrote in a 1971 book preface, “most Arabs refused to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June war [of 1967] was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves.’’
After nearly 20 years of on-and-off living in Southern California, Malcolm Kerr took a post at the American University in Cairo in 1979. Lebanon was in the midst of civil war and had become too dangerous, so setting up the family in Egypt was a compromise of sorts. Steve stayed there through his freshman year of high school before returning to California to play basketball.
In the summer of 1982, Malcolm Kerr accepted the position of president of AUB, the institution that had most shaped his life and world-view. Even though tensions in the regions were bubbling higher by the day, it was a dream job that he couldn’t turn down. As Malcolm once told Ann, “The only thing I’d rather do than watch Steve play basketball is be president of AUB.”
Meanwhile, Steve Kerr thrived at Palisades High, which had sent star Kiki VanDeWeghe to UCLA and the NBA’s Denver Nuggets just a few years earlier, though his prospects for getting a scholarship to play Division I hoops were slim. He was 6-foot-2, shot well from the outside, and could run an offense, but was scrawny at barely 175 pounds and looked as if he’d be dominated by bigger, more agile upperclassmen. He had fallen in love with UCLA as a kid, ever since his father had taught at the school during the heyday of head coach John Wooden and standout players like Bill Walton. His earliest memory of sports is going with his father to see John Lucas’s Maryland squad come to Pauley Pavilion on December 1, 1973, and watching UCLA escape with a dramatic one-point win to extend its record win streak to 77 games. (Kerr remembers feeling confused that the fans sounded disgruntled as everyone walked home that night. When Steve asked his father why they seemed so mad after a win, Malcolm Kerr replied, “Well, the expectations are a little higher than that.”)
When he was 12, Kerr was a UCLA ball boy for a couple of seasons—just as a certain UC-Irvine alum was across campus working toward his master’s in public health—but playing for the Bruins was always the longest of shots. Maybe he could walk on somewhere else? That was almost more than Kerr could hope for.
But in June 1983, a month after graduation and with no destination for the fall, Kerr was working out at a basketball showcase at California State University–Long Beach and caught the eye of Lute Olson, the incoming basketball coach at the University of Arizona. In the hierarchy of the mighty Pac-10, the Wildcats were a perpetual afterthought. Since joining the conference five years earlier, the team had produced only one winning record. In the 1982–83 season, Arizona hit rock bottom, winning just four of 28 games, so school officials poached Olson from the University of Iowa, where he’d coached the team to five straight NCAA tournament appearances, including the Final Four in 1980.
With Arizona, Olson was inheriting a mess and he needed quality players to rebuild the program. He was looking not just for talent but for character as well. “Jerks draw jerks,” Olson would say. “Great kids draw great kids.” The new coach had one scholarship left to hand out when he saw Kerr play. Though Kerr and Olson immediately connected with each other, Steve wasn’t convinced the coach wanted him, so he tentatively accepted the only scholarship offer to come along, from Cal State Fullerton. Malcolm Kerr, then back in California and sensing some great tension in Steve, called Olson and smoothed over the whole situation just in time.
A month later, thanks to a father’s intervention, the pride of PaliHi had taken his talents to Tucson, despite never having visited the campus.
Just getting there was a nightmare. Kerr had gone to Beirut to see his father before the fall semester started. He was scheduled to fly home on August 12, but as he and his mother were in the airport terminal, shells starts raining down from above. “You can never know what death sounds like until you hear one of those shells hit near you,” Kerr recalled a couple of months later. “It was the sound of death. I’ll never forget it.”
The airport was shut down for at least a couple of weeks, so Malcolm Kerr made a few calls. Three days later, Steve was driven 10 hours by car through Syria and on to Jordan, where he would fly to Cairo and then the United States. Despite the myriad military checkpoints along the route, Steve was finally airborne.
Malcolm Kerr had been planning on coming stateside (along with Ann) to see Steve play against UCLA at Pauley Pavilion in early March, but on January 18, 1984, two men (later purported to be members of Hezbollah) approached Kerr—in the same on-campus building where he and Ann had met 30 years earlier—and shot him dead. He was just 52 years old. President Reagan praised Kerr for working “tirelessly and courageously to maintain the principles of academic freedom and excellence in education.” It was the lead story in that day’s Los Angeles Times: COLLEGE CHIEF SLAIN IN BEIRUT. The next day’s New York Times, on page A1: UNIVERSITY HEAD KILLED IN BEIRUT; GUNMEN ESCAPE.
Today, a memorial stone dedicated to Kerr sits on the AUB campus and reads:
In memory of
MALCOLM H. KERR
1931–1984
He lived life abundantly
Two days after Kerr’s murder, Arizona was slated to host rival Arizona State in Pac-10 conference play. Lute Olson’s Wildcats were having a miserable first half of the season, losing 11 of 13 games, including all four Pac-10 matchups thus far. The Sun Devils, meanwhile, were a more respectable 7-7 and had won 10 straight meetings with the Wildcats.
Shortly after Kerr received the middle-of-the-night call from a family friend that his father was dead, Olson (at the urging of his wife, Bobbi) had him picked up and brought to their house. Kerr slept there for the next two nights as he tried to process what had happened. “[Lute] had lost his father so he told me his story, which was really helpful,” Kerr says. “He just wanted to give me space to do whatever I wanted. I felt like the best thing to do was just to play, get away from it.”
Olson thought Kerr would take a couple of weeks off, but his broken-hearted freshman was determined to play. He cried beforehand in the locker room, the players coming over one at a time to place a hand on his shoulder. No one would’ve faulted him had he sat this one out, but there was Kerr standing with his teammates during a pregame moment of silence. Kerr bowed his head, moving only to use his warm-up jacket to wipe away the tears streaming down his face.
Olson subbed Kerr into the game before eight minutes had elapsed, and what could’ve been just another midweek Pac-10 battle between rivals became the impromptu christening of a folk hero.
With Arizona clinging to a three-point lead, Kerr launched a long jumper from 25 feet out. Swish.
Kerr’s next shot from the right elbow, 15 feet out? Nothing but nylon.
Arizona State head coach Bob Weinhauer knew he was witnessing history. Having guided Penn to a Final Four appearance five years earlier, he was familiar with improbable performances. “To see someone perform in that situation, under that duress, with that pressure,” Weinhauer says, “that’s a special, special thing. I’ve never forgotten it.”
Arizona won in a blowout, 71–49, to give Olson his first-ever Pac-10 conference win. Kerr finished with a career-high 12 points and when he was subbed out with 1:39 left in the game, the fans inside the McKale Center gave him a standing ovation. And after each of his baskets, the public address announcer, Roger Sedlmayr, let out a bellowing “Steeeeeeeeeeve Kerrrrrrrrrr!”
And the crowd reciprocated every time: Steeeeeeeeeeve Kerrrrrrrrrr!
Two days after the death of Malcolm Kerr, the legend of Steve Kerr was born.
In the weeks that followed, he kept making buckets. Eight days after the emotional win over Arizona State, Kerr pumped in 15 points (another career-high) on the road against the University of Oregon. He’d always preferred shooting long jumpers from 20 and 25 feet out, but this newfound accuracy was a breakthrough. One of Olson’s assistant coaches, Scott Thompson, instructed Kerr during practice to shoot all of his jumpers within 15 feet of the basket. “Adrenaline,” he told Kerr, “will add ten feet.”
Maybe it sounded kooky, but it worked. Kerr played in 28 games, averaged seven points, and shot 51.6 percent from the field. In his sophomore season, Kerr started 29 of 30 and averaged 10 points (third-best on the team) on 56.8 percent shooting. As a junior, Kerr started all 32 games and finished second on the team in scoring with 14.4 points.
As Kerr improved, the Wildcats started winning more games. Arizona went 21-10 in Kerr’s sophomore season and made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in eight years. (It was the first of 23 straight NCAA tournament appearances under Olson.) For Kerr’s junior year, the Wildcats were picked to finish eighth in the conference but went 23-9 and won their first Pac-10 regular-season title in school history.
But a few weeks before his senior season was set to begin, Kerr was playing in the 1986 FIBA World Championship in Spain (with Olson as his coach) when he blew out his right knee in the semifinals as he jumped and tried to pass off to teammate Charles Smith. A defender cut in front of Kerr, who was forced to reorient his body in midair. In doing so, he landed awkwardly on his overly torqued right knee and snapped both the anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments on impact. Kerr collapsed and writhed on the court as he screamed in agony. He could only limp to the bench with some assistance under each arm, Smith holding up the right with Oscar Schmidt, the legendary Brazilian baller, supporting the left.
The Americans would win gold, but Kerr was already back in America by then, prepping for surgery. Though unable to stand there with his teammates at the end—and unable to stand at all—Kerr showed he could play. “Every day I was pretty much amazed at what he could do and what he brought to the table,” says Hall of Fame center David Robinson, another of Kerr’s teammates, “especially since he’s not an imposing guy.”
By his excelling in Spain, the glint of an NBA career for Kerr seemed more real than ever—but with a major caveat. One of the first things Tim Taft, USA Basketball’s team physician, told Kerr after diagnosing his injury was that he might never play ball again. “I’m thinking, Thanks a lot, doc,” Kerr says with a laugh. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
Taft wasn’t off base with his initial skepticism. Through the 1970s, athletes with ACL and MCL tears often never played again. But in the early eighties, advances in ligament reconstruction had progressed to the point where surgery and rehab could help, albeit with no guarantees. “With a big injury like that for a point guard, at that time,” Taft says, “it would not have been at all surprising for that to have been a career-ending injury.” Had Kerr’s ill-timed leap happened just five years earlier, his NBA prospects would have been dashed in a blink.
After the surgery, Kerr was given every assurance that he could be back playing in nine months, but that meant sitting out the 1986–87 season with a medical exemption. During that time, Kerr became a de facto student coach for the Wildcats. “We thought we were going to be really good so it was a tough blow to the team when he went down,” says Bruce Fraser, who played out his senior season with Kerr relegated to the sidelines. Arizona went 18-12 and made the NCAAs for a third-straight season. “When he was off that year, he wasn’t on the floor coaching, but I think he’s always thought he would coach.”
By the time Kerr returned to the Wildcats for the 1987–88 season, the stars had aligned. Arizona was loaded, as Kerr reunited with the dynamic Sean Elliott, a Tucson native who would become the school’s all-time leading scorer. Tom Tolbert, a senior who had transferred the year before from UC-Irvine, had also developed into a reliable big who could score and rebound at will.
Working in Kerr’s favor was that the NCAA had finally (and controversially) adopted the three-point line, set as an arc 19 feet and nine inches away from the basket on all sides. That meant Kerr’s long-range prowess could be more valuable than ever and—if he could keep up his efficiency—maybe the NBA was now a possibility. There would be time to ponder that later.
For now, the Wildcats were an unstoppable dynamo. They raced out to a 12-0 start, knocking off three top-10 teams along the way, and were ranked No. 1 in the country. They entered the NCAA Tournament with a 31-2 record and as the Pac-10 conference champs. They were also cocky with personality to spare. At pep rallies, the starters would sing one of these cheesy, anodyne raps that became popular for a time with sports teams of that era. (Kerr’s own verse: “Give Kerr the ball / give Kerr a hand / I’ll drill it in from three-point land.”) Even the bench players had their own nickname—the “Gumby Squad,” coined by Fraser—and were known for their in-game antics on the sidelines. The season felt like a five-month-long coronation, the national championship a fait accompli.
And even though Kerr had finished just fourth on the team in scoring at 12.4 per game, his three-point shooting was unfathomably good. Entering March Madness, Kerr had made 102 of 167 threes. That’s a whopping 61.1 percent, positively stratospheric in any era for a long-distance shooter. Just about 75 percent of all of his scoring came via threes. In his year away from the game, Kerr’s greatest skill as a player had been fully weaponized, and a new era of college basketball had dawned. It was up to him to take full advantage.
Kerr, tempestuous as a child, had developed a thick skin and learned to channel his anger through basketball. Ann Kerr says her son “could contain his emotions more carefully when he had to run back and forth on the court all the time.” There was no better display than late in his senior year, during a February game in Tempe against Arizona State, when a dozen or so students started taunting him in warm-ups with phrases such as “PLO!” and “Go back to Beirut!” as well as other references to his father’s death. With tears welling up in his eyes, Kerr had to sit down for a few minutes to calm himself. He’d heard similar remarks from ASU students over the years but nothing this hurtful.
Kerr went 6-of-6 on three-pointers in the first half and finished with 22 points in a blowout win, 101–73. After the win, Kerr called those specific fans “the scum of the earth” and admitted they motivated him to play better: “I was looking for my shot a little more. At halftime, I kind of got control of my temper. Maybe I should get mad more often.” A few days later, Arizona State athletic director Charles Harris sent Kerr a personal letter of apology, but by then the Wildcats already had eyes on wrapping up the Pac-10 tournament title (which they did with ease) and making an emphatic statement in the NCAAs.
With four wins over the first two weeks of the tourney, the Wildcats pushed their record to 35-2 and earned a trip to their first Final Four in school history. Their reward? A date with Mookie Blaylock, Stacey King, and a stacked University of Oklahoma team that averaged 104 points, in part, by forcing a ridiculous 24 turnovers per game.
Kerr, facing the end of his collegiate career with an opportunity to win a championship, played better as the rounds progressed, yet he tried to maintain some perspective. A few months earlier, with the 12-0 Wildcats atop the national rankings, Kerr joked to a reporter that winning a championship might not be the best thing for him. “Everything in my life would be downhill after that,” he deadpanned.
Alas, the Wildcats’ season came to a bitter end as they lost to the Sooners, 86–78. It remains their best season (record-wise) in school history, but the chance was there for more and they could not capitalize. Kerr had one of the worst games of his life, unable to find any rhythm amidst the Sooners’ smothering full-court press. The most lethal three-point shooter in college basketball missed 10 of 13 shots from beyond the arc. Kerr gave everything he had—he was the only Wildcat to play all 40 minutes—yet it was for nothing. He scored only six points. “I got completely off track, just not being in rhythm,” Kerr says. “It was the pressure of the moment. I kept firing away, I kept trying to find it, but I couldn’t find it. Without a doubt, not even close, the most frustrating game of my life.”
Olson thinks the pressure of having Ann Kerr there in attendance affected her son. Fraser, by then a graduate student coach on Olson’s staff, saw Kerr go through a perfect warm-up routine and saw no foreshadowing of what was to come. “Usually, if a guy is nervous, he’s going to be missing in warm-ups, too,” Fraser says. “Oklahoma got off to a good start and their press affected us and maybe that affected his timing. If he shoots it well, we probably win the whole thing, just because we were the best team.”
Kerr was devastated, convinced he had let the team down. “He felt like it was his fault, and we were right there,” Fraser says. “You see the frustration in his face when that happens, but when you have a shooter like that, you’re always waiting for the next one to go in.”
Regardless of the reason, if Kerr had simply hit threes at his seasonal average—or even only a smidge worse—Arizona would’ve advanced to play for a national championship.
“I will always blame myself for us losing that game,” Kerr told author John Feinstein in the seminal 1988 book A Season Inside: One Year in College Basketball, of which Kerr was a focal point. “People keep coming up to me and saying it wasn’t my fault but I really don’t believe that. I really think—and I always will—that if I had shot well, we would have won that game. What people don’t understand is, I can live with it. It will always bother me a little bit but that’s all. I didn’t choke or anything. I just had a bad shooting day. I’m a shooter and my shot was off at the worst possible time.
“Because of what’s happened in my life, I’m not going to brood for that long about a college basketball game, even the most important one of my life. Was I down? Absolutely. Pissed off? You bet. But done in? No way. I’ve bounced back from losses a whole lot bigger than that one.”
• • •
Steve Kerr would go on to have one of the most unconventionally successful careers of any NBA player in history. In the 1988 draft, he was selected by the Phoenix Suns late in the second round (50th overall). Team president Jerry Colangelo (father of the aforementioned Bryan) was criticized for selecting the Arizona fan favorite as some sort of courtesy pick. “He showed enough that he deserved a shot,” Colangelo says. “That’s the point, and he had enough skill. His great shooting ability was enough to warrant that opportunity.”
Kerr played only 26 games in his rookie year, was often placed on the injured list, and then summarily shipped off to Cleveland, where he played three seasons for the Cavs, who traded him to Orlando, where he played half a season with a rookie center named Shaquille O’Neal. After five seasons with only middling success, Kerr was happy at home with Margot and newborn son Nick, but his career was at a crossroads. He thought about calling Lute Olson and giving up the NBA to start a coaching career.
In September 1993, Kerr signed a free agent contract with the Chicago Bulls. In the 10 seasons that followed—in Chicago, Portland, and two stints in San Antonio—Kerr would play more than 760 games between the regular season and playoffs and start only once, but he flourished as a dependable sixth man who could provide scoring off the bench in bunches. Kerr also became the most accurate three-point shooter in the league, shooting 52.4 percent in 1994–95—a single-season record that stood for 15 years. The next year, he shot 51.5 percent from deep as the Bulls won a record 72 regular-season games and their fourth championship of the Jordan era.
A year later, Kerr redeemed himself for the Final Four fizzle.
With Game 6 of the 1997 Finals tied with just 28 seconds to play, everyone inside the United Center assumed the ball would go to Jordan for the potential game-winner—or, more precisely, championship-winner, since the Bulls led the series three games to two. As the timeout was almost over, Jordan, draped in a white towel and sipping from a Gatorade cup, looked over at Kerr two chairs down and mumbled under his breath for him to be ready just in case.
“If he comes off,” Kerr shouted back, referring to his defender, Utah guard John Stockton, “I’ll be ready.”
Jordan, already looking away, nodded.
Brent Musberger yelled on the ESPN Radio telecast, “It’ll be a scoop if anybody but Michael Jordan takes this shot!” And it looked as if the obvious scenario might play out. Kerr passed off to Scottie Pippen, who passed to Jordan out on the left side with 11 seconds left. But sure enough, as Jordan thought he might, Stockton came over for the double-team.
Kerr was wide open at the top of the key.
Jordan found him with seven seconds left and Kerr calmly swished a 20-footer to give the Bulls an 88–86 lead they would not relinquish. Jordan was named Finals MVP, but it was Kerr’s shot that had won an NBA championship.
At the postparade celebration, Kerr gave his version of how the final sequence was drawn up and said that head coach Phil Jackson told Jordan to take the last shot: “And Michael said, ‘You know, Phil, I don’t feel real comfortable in these situations so maybe we ought to go in another direction.’ So I thought to myself, Well, I guess I gotta bail Michael out again.” Jordan and Jackson were already in stitches, but it was Kerr giving a little shrug as he said the last part—about having to bail out the greatest player in NBA history—that really sent the Chicago crowd into hysterics. The affability and good humor that had served Kerr through the darkest of times were on display for the crowning moment of his professional career.
“Did Steve have physical gifts that jump out at you immediately? No, he didn’t,” says B. J. Armstrong, who played two seasons in Chicago with Kerr. “But the more time you’ve spent around Steve, you began to see things.”
The Bulls won the title again in 1998, which made three in a row for Kerr. Midway through the 1998–99 season, Kerr was traded to San Antonio and won yet another title that June. Four titles in four years for Kerr, making him the first and only non–Boston Celtic to ever accomplish the feat. Aside from being able to boast a title-winning shot Kerr was now the answer to a sports bar trivia question.
After a few more seasons, Kerr could sense two decades of competitive basketball betraying him, especially in his long-ago surgically repaired right knee, so when the opportunity came to rejoin head coach Gregg Popovich in San Antonio for the 2002–03 season, he knew it would be his last rodeo. “I could feel my body breaking down,” Kerr says.
Kerr played in 75 games, more than in any year since 1996–97, but even at only 12 minutes a game, Kerr still knocked down threes at a 40 percent clip. His looming retirement filled him not with fear but with freedom. Without having to worry about playing for contracts—“I didn’t anticipate anybody would be dumb enough to offer me another”—Kerr played solely for the singular joy of every game left. “It’s a great feeling to have success behind you and no pressure ahead of you,” he says. “Just ride it out and you play. I felt liberated that year and I played like it.”
Kerr played sparingly through the playoffs. Entering Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals against the intrastate rival Dallas Mavericks, Kerr had compiled only 13 minutes across five playoff games. Around teammates, he started calling himself “Ted,” a reference to the cryogenically preserved Ted Williams. From lack of use, Kerr could feel his 37-year-old body going into deep freeze.
The Spurs were one win away from another trip to the Finals but were scuffling badly. They had blown a 17-point lead at home in Game 5 and were down late in Game 6. The Mavs, led by All-Stars Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash, looked as if they had all the mojo to win and force a deciding Game 7 in San Antonio.
That’s when Popovich called Kerr’s number one last time.
With starter Tony Parker playing at less than full capacity, thanks to some bad room-service crème brûlée from the night before, Popovich subbed in Kerr for the first time all night with 3:44 left in the third.
Kerr promptly assisted on a Stephen Jackson three, then made one of his own, a high-arching shot from the corner. “Somebody closed out on me really hard,” he says. “Sometimes when you make a shot with a lot of arc, you kind of get in your cage quickly. In a weird way, you just sort of get tuned in.”
With 10 minutes to play and the Spurs behind by 12, Kerr assisted on a Manu Ginobili three, then another Jackson three. Another triple from Jackson and the Mavs’ lead stood at 71–68.
Off a pass from Ginobili, Kerr nailed a straightaway three to tie the game.
Then he hit another three.
And another.
When Nick Van Exel’s layup with 2:51 left finally halted a 23–0 run by the Spurs, Dallas had been held scoreless for more than eight minutes and was down by eight. Kerr finished with 12 points, his highest output in more than six months. San Antonio outscored Dallas in the fourth, 34–9, and won by a comfortable 12-point margin to reach yet another Finals.
“It was an incredible moment. You had to be there to understand what this moment meant for all of us,” says David Robinson, who was also retiring after 14 seasons of his own. “It was the epitome of who Steve is. Here’s a guy who wasn’t playing at all. He hadn’t sniffed the court, but when he was called on, that man came up huge. We were having a blast with it because that was so Steve. He’s just that guy. That’s why Michael Jordan called on him. If there’s anybody you can count on, you need somebody to trust, he’s the guy.”
Kerr’s conference finals conflagration also didn’t surprise Popovich. “The guy is there before and after practice, running and shooting until he’s dripping wet,” he told reporters before the Finals. “He hasn’t stopped practicing every day, working every day, even though he hasn’t played.”
For years, the Spurs coach and team president sought to fill his roster with players who were not only talented but of high character. “Life is too short to be with jerks,” Popovich said. “This is a business, and it’s not the most important thing in the world.”
Kerr played only 20 minutes in the Finals against the New Jersey Nets, but the Spurs easily won the title in six games. With five championship rings, Kerr retired as the most accurate three-point shooter (45.4 percent) in NBA history, and he, Margot, and their three kids soon moved from San Antonio to set down roots in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe.
In 2004, Kerr was part of the ownership group that helped Robert Sarver (himself an Arizona alum) purchase the Phoenix Suns for a then-record sum of $401 million. Three years later, Sarver hired Kerr (then a successful TV analyst) as his general manager. All the while Kerr had considered coaching but decided the timing wasn’t right. Maybe when his three kids were a little older. With his family still near San Diego, Kerr tried to take Phoenix from its fast-paced days (immortalized in Jack McCallum’s book Seven Seconds or Less) into a new era under point guard Steve Nash, center Amar’e Stoudemire, and coach Mike D’Antoni. The Suns’ high-flying offense made them one of the NBA’s most exhilarating teams, but Kerr wanted the Suns to play more defense.
Over the next three years, the Suns’ proficiency waffled between merely mediocre and next-level. Phoenix won 55 games in Kerr’s first season as GM, but his trading away Shawn Marion for an aging Shaquille O’Neal proved disastrous. The Suns were knocked out in the first round of the playoffs, and D’Antoni resigned to lead the New York Knicks. New coach Terry Porter was fired just four months into the following season and replaced by offensive guru Alvin Gentry. The Suns won 46 games but missed the playoffs. They rebounded in 2009–10, despite having failed to acquire Stephen Curry from the Warriors in the days after the draft, and won 54 games. They advanced to the conference finals before falling to the Lakers in six games.
Kerr resigned as general manager after the season. “Once he was a GM, he realized that wasn’t his lane in this business,” says Bruce Fraser. Three years in Phoenix had drained Kerr, who missed being around his family. Still just 44, time was on his side for a return to the NBA should the right opportunity come along. Until that day came, Kerr hoped to spend as much time with his wife and kids as possible, maybe take another gig calling games, as he had for three years at TNT between his retirement and joining the Suns’ front office.
On June 29, 2010, news broke that Kerr was returning to TNT as an analyst. “I still get to enjoy the game itself but also be in a better position,” he said that day.
Two weeks later, Joe Lacob—an old golfing buddy of Kerr’s going back to the late nineties—announced he was buying the Golden State Warriors.
• • •
By May 2014, Steve Kerr was the hottest head coaching candidate on the planet. As TNT’s lead on-air analyst, his reputation as one of basketball’s minds grew, and he was never shy in sharing his opinion. Just a couple of weeks after taking the job, Kerr ripped LeBron James’s “Decision” to join Miami—“It just isn’t right to host a show to announce you’re abandoning your hometown”—and questioned whether the Heat could win a title out of the gate: “You’ve got to find a shooting guard, a couple of big men who can defend, and it takes time to develop a team—a real team.” (Kerr’s words seemed prescient when Miami lost in the Finals to Dallas a year later.)
Above all, Kerr was cool, calm, eminently likeable, and clearly knew his stuff. He was now 11 years removed from his last game, but with his svelte frame, closely cropped blond hair, and irrepressible smile, Kerr still looked the part of the backup point guard who won five titles. The smart money had Kerr moving east to coach the New York Knicks, where Phil Jackson, his old Bulls coach and a mentor, was team president.
But now here was Kerr in a conference room in Oklahoma City, where he was calling the playoff series between the Thunder and the Clippers. Huddled with Joe and Kirk Lacob, Bob Myers, and Travis Schlenk, Kerr outlined the tactics he’d implement as head coach of the Warriors. Over three hours, Kerr talked about scouting reports he had prepared, rotation tweaks he would make, improvements to sleep and diet that might be explored, and how he’d integrate analytics into his day-to-day duties.
For his staff, Kerr wanted to hire David Blatt (a 20-year head coach across Europe and a brilliant offensive mind), Alvin Gentry (his former head coach in Phoenix), and Ron Adams (an NBA assistant coach for nearly 20 years and one of the league’s foremost defensive whizzes). Everyone was blown away by Kerr’s confidence and preparedness. His presentation reached some 60 pages, with about a third of that being Warriors-specific and added just in the last few hours. The Warriors’ execs couldn’t stop talking about the document as they flew out of OKC. “There were a lot of little things that first-time head coaches don’t even think about,” Kirk Lacob later told the San Francisco Chronicle, “but he had already considered all of it in great detail.”
The next day, Kerr and the Warriors agreed on a five-year, $25 million contract. He would have to divest the small percentage of the Suns that he still owned, but he would not be commuting from San Diego as he had when in Phoenix. Kerr had, against all expectations, spurned his friend and mentor in New York to take over a more talented team with immense expectations. Mark Jackson was right: 51 wins would not be enough. Lacob expected greatness and he expected it soon.
Kerr knew the best way for that to happen was to try to win over the players as fast as possible, to get them to buy into what he was selling. He spoke with Stephen Curry by phone before news broke of his hiring and, over the next few weeks, flew personally to see players like Andrew Bogut (in Australia) and Harrison Barnes (in Miami). He made sure to publicly credit Mark Jackson, which was seen by the players as a show of respect and a nod to what they had already accomplished as a group thus far, and let them keep certain Mark Jackson–era traditions, such as a massive motivational poster hung high in the locker room that read “mUSt be jUSt about US.”
For Kerr, going to Oakland rather than New York also meant he wouldn’t be pressured into running “the triangle,” a convoluted, old-fashioned offense that was popularized by Phil Jackson and assistant coach Tex Winter with the Chicago Bulls over many years (including when Kerr won three titles there) and predicated on timing and positioning. Now, Kerr would incorporate parts of the triangle (the kind of high-post action that Geno Auriemma, the legendary University of Connecticut women’s coach, has perfected) and elements of its foundation (precise passing, locational awareness) that were, Kerr thought, essential to success in the modern NBA.
But there was more to life than coaching the triangle, and Kerr had learned a lifetime of knowledge from many of the game’s greatest minds, either as a player or as an employer. Gregg Popovich, Lenny Wilkens, and Mike D’Antoni, as well as Phil Jackson, all had aspects of their respective strategies that Kerr could pick and choose from, like a basketball nerd’s buffet line: loops, drag screens, back cuts, floor spacing, all served on a bed of quick, constant motion. An offense that could emulsify these sensibilities into one magic brew couldn’t be further from what Mark Jackson had installed, which was a traditional-style offense reliant on high pick-and-rolls, isolation down low, and scripted threes for Curry and Thompson. It was a predictable, stagnant kind of hoops that didn’t maximize the team’s true talents. A timely pick-and-roll could serve as an elegant weapon—and would retain a place in Kerr’s offense—but there was so much more the Warriors could execute.
To help institute all this new thinking, Kerr needed dependable assistants he could trust. Blatt, who was atop Kerr’s list, was deep into negotiations with the Warriors but jumped at the chance to coach a rebuilding Cleveland Cavaliers squad when that vacancy was offered to him in mid-June. (That whole dynamic irrevocably changed three weeks later when LeBron James came home to the Cavs.) Kerr’s other targets, Gentry and Adams, both agreed to come aboard. With Gentry helping conceive the new-look offense and Adams hunkering down on improving an already-decent defense, Golden State’s new direction was gaining form and function.
Kerr rounded out the staff with familiar names and fresh faces:
• Luke Walton, who played 10 years in the NBA and won two titles with the Lakers, was hired as an assistant coach. A former University of Arizona standout who played one year alongside Andre Iguodala, the 34-year-old Walton was also the son of UCLA legend and Hall of Famer Bill Walton. Just a year removed from the NBA, Walton understood both the players and the modern game. But aside from a few months as an assistant at the University of Memphis during the 2011 NBA lockout, Walton had zero coaching experience.
• Bruce Fraser, a Phoenix Suns scout and former personal coach to Steve Nash, was hired to work on player development. A former Arizona teammate of Kerr’s (and one of his best friends), Fraser brought a laid-back Long Beach disposition to practice and often went by “Q,” a nickname acquired in his college days for the myriad questions he could ask. (Fraser was also responsible for setting up Kerr with his wife, Margot, on a blind date in college.)
• Jarron Collins, who played 10 years in the NBA, including a year with the Suns when Kerr was general manager, was also hired to work on player development. Collins, before he was represented by Bob Myers, was a star at Stanford along with twin brother Jason, whose April 2013 announcement in Sports Illustrated that he was gay had led to those controversial, quasi-homophobic comments from Mark Jackson.
Lacob was overjoyed that Kerr was not repeating the mistakes of his predecessor. He’d hired a cadre of assistants who were experienced, open-minded, adaptable, and just plain enjoyable to work with. Lacob saw how companies could disintegrate from the inside simply because people couldn’t stand their coworkers. That usually stemmed from a leadership issue, and Kerr seemed destined to go down a more constructive and collaborative path. Above all, he wanted his players to channel their passion for the game, remembering that basketball, above all else, was supposed to be fun.
That attitude was vital right from the get-go. While he had his faults and likely would have lasted only another full season, if that, Jackson had engendered team chemistry where none existed and showed them how to be winners in the NBA. Going forward, the Warriors were not a sure thing to play any better basketball or win any more games than they had under Jackson, but any future success would not be possible without his contributions, despite the irreconcilable differences that precipitated his ouster.
And despite the late-season flameout at the hands of the Clippers, the Warriors, thanks to some radically improved play, had cemented their place as one of the league’s up-and-coming franchises, a team on the precipice of contending with the NBA’s perennial powerhouses. All the signs had been there for months. In January 2014, Zach Lowe penned a Grantland feature headlined WHY NOT THE WARRIORS? It was a bold, compelling argument, centered on the idea that Golden State “has everything to make it work.” His contention was that the addition of Iguodala had turned their starting five into an elite first unit, one that “may well be the best lineup in the entire NBA,” as Lowe deduced from looking into the advanced metrics. They were still very much a middling team in a tough Western Conference, but the foundation had been poured and was starting to settle.
“The raw material of a contender is here,” Lowe concluded. “Imagine that: a potential contender in Golden State. You don’t have to imagine anymore.”
• • •
Almost as soon as Kerr arrived in Oakland, the Warriors were faced with the most pressing personnel decision since Lacob reluctantly gave the go-ahead to trade Monta Ellis to Milwaukee two and a half years earlier.
The Minnesota Timberwolves were dangling Kevin Love like a carrot in front of the Warriors’ noses, but they wanted Klay Thompson in return. On the surface, a case could be made for Golden State to trade the beloved Splash Brother for Love, a three-time All-Star who was not just an elite scorer (26 points per game) but also an excellent three-point shooter, having knocked down 37.6 percent of his attempts on high volume just a season ago. Listed at 6-foot-10, Love was a coveted “stretch-four,” a power forward who could shoot from the perimeter and space out the floor by forcing his defender to come out of the paint to play defense. That, in practice, would unclog the area down low of at least one big and free up the Warriors to attack the rim if they so desired.
There were a few problems, though. One was that Love was a year older than Thompson. He also wasn’t a shooting guard like Thompson, so it wasn’t as simple as swapping one in for the other. And this Warriors ecosystem, which had maintained some sense of balance through even the most tumultuous parts of the Mark Jackson era, would invariably be upset in some way. Finally, Kerr was promising to restore a fundamental emphasis on defense and Love was not regarded as a good defender at all. Timberwolves opponents scored 5.6 more points per 48 minutes and shot 1.2 percent better from the field when Love was on the court as opposed to the bench. The Warriors’ own internal analysis also confirmed Love’s defensive shortcomings.
Sure, Love could score in bunches, shoot threes like a sniper, and was a UCLA alum (like Bob Myers), but internal resistance was firm. Two people above all others held the line against green-lighting the trade: Steve Kerr and Jerry West. In business and sports, sometimes it’s the moves you don’t make that can affect your organization more than the ones you do. In this case, two persuasive dissenters made a compelling case that Thompson was the preferable player, the one better suited to both the Warriors’ style of play and their future plans. West, in particular, was adamant that Thompson remain a Warrior. In no uncertain terms, he made it clear to all who’d listen that he would resign his position should Thompson be shipped off. The public was just as divided, as some fans thought Love might be the missing piece to a championship. Others—such as NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott, who posted a YouTube video to personally urge Joe Lacob to keep Curry and Thompson together—were not so convinced.
“We encourage very strong debate,” Lacob later said, “but then it’s my job to make the decision. I certainly listen most of the time to what the group decides and then we just do it and we go. I do think that is what’s different. That’s what separates us. That’s the Silicon Valley way, the entrepreneur way. That is not the big company way.”
In the end, Lacob heeded the advice of both his new coach and his most senior adviser. All trade discussions were nixed, and, after training camp, Thompson was signed to a four-year contract extension worth some $70 million. Kerr and West (and, I suppose, Lott) got their wish and the Splash Brothers would remain side by side for at least another three seasons, while Love was traded to Cleveland later that summer after LeBron James rejoined the franchise from Miami.
Even as the Warriors worked to resolve Thompson’s status one way or the other, Myers moved to shore up the weaker spots in his roster. In July, he signed veteran point guard Shaun Livingston to be Curry’s backup. The onetime high school phenom from Peoria, Illinois, didn’t shoot threes and was most known for the horrific broken leg he’d suffered in 2007 (which required a year and a half of rehab), but he was 6-foot-7 with long arms, never met a midrange jumper he didn’t adore, and was regarded as a good teammate devoid of ego and pretense. Playing for eight different franchises in nine years will give you a new perspective on NBA life, and Livingston was open to any role the Warriors asked of him. Curry now had a legitimate backup who could keep the offense humming in his stead.
In September, the Warriors signed Leandro Barbosa, a wing scorer who was entering his 12th season in the league. Though only 6-foot-3 and sporting a funky shooting style, the Brazilian Blur, as he was known, was fast off the dribble but could just as easily knock one down from deep (a career 39 percent three-point shooter) if he caught you napping on defense. Barbosa had played for four different teams, but his best years came when he was in Phoenix, which was how Kerr became familiar with him and his work ethic. Between Barbosa and Livingston, Kerr now had experienced second-unit contributors ready to check in at his request.
But Kerr knew he could make the second unit stronger still, even as he improved the starters. That’s when, after just two preseason games and midway through his first training camp ever as a head coach, Kerr sat down Andre Iguodala—the $48 million man who had started all 758 games over his 10-year NBA career and averaged nearly 15 points every time out—and asked if he’d cede his starting role as small forward to Harrison Barnes. Even for an experienced coach with a decade or more behind the bench, this was a daring request.
Iguodala was initially hesitant, as any employee with established credentials would be, but Kerr convinced him of the utility of moving up Barnes (to help accelerate his overall development, which Kerr believed had been stymied) and having Iguodala lead a second unit consisting of Livingston, Barbosa, Draymond Green, and Marreese Speights—four legitimate rotation players whose minutes could be staggered with various combinations of starters, allowing Kerr and assistant coach Alvin Gentry to mix and match players from both units as needed.
Kerr was persuasive enough and Iguodala, to the surprise of some inside the organization, accepted what was essentially a no-fault demotion. As the former All-Star told Sports Illustrated, “I agreed with his larger vision. . . . I’ve been in this league eleven years and I want my professionalism to be something that stands out.” Lacob and Myers had talked for years about bringing in high-character guys who would put the team before themselves, and Iguodala exemplified that notion distilled to its essence. (It probably also helped that Kerr and Iguodala, as a couple of University of Arizona alums, shared a certain kinship.)
With Iguodala penciled in as a reserve, the Warriors won their next preseason game—in Los Angeles against Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, and the Lakers—by 41 points.
With the rotation set, Kerr completing his playbook, Curry and Thompson united for the foreseeable future, and a bench unit that was good enough to start for the league’s worst teams, the Warriors looked ready to finally capitalize on their years-long upward trajectory.
There was no small amount of pressure on Kerr to keep the good times rolling. Curry and others were saying all the right things regarding their new coach and appreciated his deference to what Jackson had helped establish, but establishing trust takes time. Plus, the optics of a white man with no previous coaching experience replacing an African-American coach who was beloved by his players and fired for reasons that were, at best, difficult for the larger fan base to comprehend, presented a moment where it all could’ve come crashing down. When the season started, people of color comprised 76.7 percent of players but just a third of the 30 head coaches. Kerr didn’t allow such external considerations to weigh on him, but they were there all the same.
• • •
The Warriors flew through the preseason, winning six of eight matchups, and it looked as if Kerr’s offense predicated on ball movement and predictive motion would be a smash hit. Curry and Thompson were getting open looks as never before, Barnes was facilitating from the small forward position, and even Lee and Bogut, as the two bigs up front, were rebounding and passing with aplomb. They were scoring more than 110 a game, six points higher than last season’s average. Of course, preseason statistics are almost useless, since every team is tweaking rotations and playing time irrespective of in-game situations, but more scoring (so long as it’s not compromising your defense) is always preferable to less. And with just a few days before the opener—on the road against Vivek Ranadivé’s Sacramento Kings—Golden State looked a juggernaut waiting to take the league by storm.
Then David Lee came down with a strained hamstring, similar to the one that had kept him sidelined toward the end of the previous season. Once it became clear he wouldn’t be ready for opening night, Kerr called on Draymond Green to start in his place at power forward.
When considering franchise-altering decisions that seemed inconsequential at the time, you’d be hard-pressed to propose anything that beats the Green-for-Lee switcheroo. Green had been, to that point, little more than an emotional role player who could play lockdown defense at times, show off some long-distance range, and pass like a point guard. Coming out of Michigan State, he was the ultimate “tweener,” bigger than your typical shooting guard yet undersized as compared to the league’s premier small and power forwards. In sports, just as in any major field of business, executives say they value versatility but will not hesitate to label you if that’s more convenient. It’s risk aversion put into action, as evinced by Green’s mere 18 starts (playoffs included) in two full seasons of play.
Green was also fiery like a 10-year veteran, possessing an on-court attitude that veered into cockiness. It was the raw manifestation of his feelings about dropping into the second round of the draft. In time, he could recite from memory all 34 players picked ahead of him—not just their names but who took them, in what order, and what had happened with their careers in the years since. That the Warriors ultimately passed on Green not once (Harrison Barnes at No. 7) but twice (Festus Ezeli at No. 30) was no small thing either, but he knew Oakland was the perfect place for him.
Kerr, in turn, was the perfect coach for him. As someone who constantly had to prove his worth over 15 seasons in the NBA—and was known for an irrational confidence that sometimes surfaced as unbridled rage—Kerr saw himself in Green. And two years before he became his coach, Kerr watched Green play Summer League games in Las Vegas and confessed to one Warriors staffer: “I don’t know what position Draymond Green plays, but I know I want him on the floor.”
Playing time was scarce early on for Green, but he always seemed to leave an impression. (Even in practice, Green rarely backed down from anyone.) Just six weeks into his rookie season, the Warriors embarked on their first East Coast road trip of the season. They’d won the first four games before heading south to face the defending champion Miami Heat. Green was laboring through a lackluster start, playing in all 21 games but averaging fewer than three points on barely 13 minutes. As the first big off the bench that night, Mark Jackson matched him against none other than LeBron James, who, in recent months, had racked up an NBA title, earned Finals MVP, won an Olympic gold medal, and was named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year.
No big deal.
All night long, Green handled his assignment with aplomb, enveloping James on baseline dribble-drives, pull-up threes, and post-ups. He couldn’t totally neutralize James—who can?—but Green played the defense of someone four or five years into an NBA career. Early in the fourth, James managed to convert a tough drive at the basket and draw a foul on Green. The King then unleashed the kind of psychological trash talk that made Michael Jordan so lethal. He jawed at Green, “You too little!” On this one play, yes, Green didn’t establish enough position to keep James from extending toward the hoop, but the rookie’s defensive impact was undeniable. In the 16 minutes James played that night with Green on the bench, he shot 4-of-5 from the field. In his 26 minutes with Green in the game? Just 8-of-18. James’s three rebounds on the night were also a season-low.
With just two seconds left in the game, it was Green who slipped away from Shane Battier (who had moved to help defend Klay Thompson), received a pass from Jarrett Jack as he cut to the rim, and converted an easy lay-up. Was Green “too little” to even be noticed, that he could scoot to the hoop at will against the best team in the NBA? Regardless, the Warriors prevailed, 97–95. Green played a career-high 30 minutes, chipped in seven points, held the reigning MVP to just 23 points while he was on the floor, and nailed the game-winner. The Heat would go on to win the title again that season, but Green, on this night, had started to make his name known.
Kerr knew what it was like to rely on heart and guile to overcome doubters. He saw in Green the same struggle he’d experienced in gaining respect from his NBA peers. In his case, though, it often involved his own teammates. Kerr once received a black eye from Jordan in a Bulls practice when trash talk between him and His Airness escalated. The shiner notwithstanding, Kerr knew he’d gained Jordan’s respect by not backing down from his lip, and Green possessed that same mentality. Kerr’s and Green’s mannerisms overlapped in many ways. “I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m arrogant,” Green told Grantland later in the 2014–15 season. “I’m just confident. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m an asshole. I just don’t take no shit. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m disrespectful. You’ve just got to earn my respect.”
• • •
The Warriors began the season with Green at power forward, matched up with Andrew Bogut at center and Harrison Barnes at small forward. With Curry and Thompson in the backcourt, Golden State sought to take the league by storm right from the get-go. And did they ever, winning their first three games—over Sacramento, the Los Angeles Lakers, and Portland—with ease.
By this time the SportVU tracking system had started to fully mature, reaching all corners of the NBA. Now, teams had powerful analytical tools at their disposal that could quickly determine the defensive value of, say, Draymond Green compared to David Lee. The latter had never been considered an elite defender, but the upgrade in playing Green over Lee could now be accurately calculated. While Lee was sidelined, it was a recurring debate whether Kerr would sub him back in with the starters. It was no small thing that Lee was making $15 million, more than anyone on the roster, but by the time Lee was healthy enough to play, Green was an irreplaceable cog in Kerr’s machine.
Just a couple of months into the season, Golden State was regarded as the best team in the NBA. After starting off 5-2, they reeled off 16 wins in a row, finally succumbing on the road in Memphis. They then won 14 of their next 19 to hit the season’s midway point with a record of 35 wins and six losses. Curry, at nearly 23 points and eight assists a night, was a legitimate MVP candidate. Thompson’s scoring output was nearly identical. Andrew Bogut missed a 12-game stretch with right knee inflammation but the Warriors went 9-3. Iguodala embraced his role as a sixth man and de facto leader of the second unit, averaging 27 minutes—just five minutes fewer than a year earlier—and seven points, while Barnes thrived with the starters. The third-year man from UNC was shooting 49.2 percent from the field (his career average was 41.9 percent) and making 42.6 of his threes (again, up from 35.2 percent for his career).
Kerr’s Iguodala/Barnes flip-flop had paid off. His decision to keep Green in the starting lineup, even after Lee had been cleared to return, was validated. They had the best record in the league and the third-best Offensive Rating. They also had the best Defensive Rating in the NBA, allowing just 96.9 points per 100 possessions—an astounding feat considering they also played the fastest pace (more than 101 possessions per game) of any team. Their Net Rating—the number of points per 100 possessions by which they outscored their opponents—was on track to be the highest ever recorded. The website Basketball Reference put the Warriors’ odds of winning a title at close to 40 percent, far better than any other team’s.
It had taken less than three months for Golden State to become the prohibitive favorite to win its first championship in four decades.
• • •
With Kerr coaching the team, the Warriors, as an organization, were more open than ever to trying out new techniques that might benefit the team down the line. Bruce Fraser, Kerr’s former Arizona teammate and now assistant coach, connected him with a man named Chris Johnson. For the past six years, Johnson had worked as a clinical neuropsychologist for the U.S. Navy and was running their Operational Neuroscience Lab down in San Diego. He had UCLA roots, having earned a PhD in psychology from there in 2005, and did two years of postdoc study at Yale. Johnson also grew up a fan of the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls, which made him an instant fan of Kerr.
Over the next few months, Johnson served as a part-time team psychologist, showing up in the Bay Area twice a month, conferring with players as needed, even texting them out of the blue simply to make sure they were in a good headspace. Johnson emphasized the importance of staying focused, not succumbing to the allure of perfectionism, and making good decisions under stress.
Another way Kerr hoped to manage stress was by advocating better sleep and rest habits. Player conditioning was a topic that had long fascinated Kerr. During his 2014 Sloan panel, he mused about the potential to design conditioning programs for players “based on not only how much you got played but the stress on his body.” Maybe the quantification of bodily stress wasn’t quite there yet—although using devices such as chest-based accelerometers in practice was a good start—but sleep was a surefire way to counteract the rigors of the NBA schedule. That was especially true for the Warriors, who, by virtue of their extreme geographical placement, would travel the most of any team during the 2014–15 regular season—some 54,954 miles in all.
Before the season, Kerr was prodded by Keke Lyles, the team’s director of athletic performance, to follow through on consulting some kind of sleep expert. Luckily for the Warriors, they had one of the country’s foremost experts on the sleep habits of athletes based in the Bay Area. In the summer of 2011, a Stanford researcher named Cheri Mah published research showing the benefits college basketball players could experience with just a few adjustments, such as increasing their sleep to 10 hours a night and taking 30-minute daytime naps as needed. Mah found that sprint times went up, fatigue levels went down, and both free-throw and three-point percentages showed marked improvements.
With more than a decade of sleep experience under her belt, Mah worked with the Warriors to suggest ways they could counteract the effects of their difficult schedule. She urged the players to cut down their game-day naps from two or three hours down to 30 minutes or so. She advised them to stay off their phones late at night before bedtime. The Warriors also looked to rearrange their travel schedule to cut down on, say, long overnight flights back from road games, which can wreak havoc on a player’s circadian rhythms. “You’re trying to link what happens at nighttime with performance during the daytime,” Mah says. “Those were my strategies—of taking it home, trying to get the performance angle, building in small changes that we continue to build on over time—and it seemed to be pretty effective.”
In the year since he joined the Warriors, Andre Iguodala had already felt the benefits of such practices—he would even go so far as to lower his thermostat to 57 degrees to keep his core body temperature cool—and he was a willing advocate for better sleep, even if some of the other players (such as Andrew Bogut) were more opposed to tweaking long-standing habits. “I’m not necessarily trying to overhaul everything that they’ve ever known,” Mah says of her approach, but having Iguodala’s support was key to everything. “There’s a trickle-down effect across the rest of the team. For him to have the success that he did while advocating for it, obviously that’s helpful.”
The team also worked on aggregating more sets of objective data related to the players’ health and conditioning. Again, this was something Kerr had thought about for years, and now he was with an organization with the resources and inclination to press forward with such tech-centric initiatives. They partnered with a Finnish startup, Omegawave, to assess heart-rate variability using facial electrodes. Catapult Sports, an Australian firm, helped outfit the Warriors with wireless GPS sensors that could track acceleration, the force exerted on bones and joints, and directional changes in real time during practice. (The CBA forbade teams to track individual player data during games, but practice was safe ground.)
These gigabytes of data were then combined with the Warriors’ own internal evaluations—a simple test administered daily that the players filled out and handed back—to determine their game-readiness. How they’d been sleeping, how sore they felt, how quick their thinking was—all of these factors fed into the ultimate determinations. Kerr and his staff could then look at these readouts and make an educated conclusion about when a player might need a reduction in minutes or even a night off.
Close to March, with the playoffs about six weeks off, the evaluations started to show troubling signs. Curry and Thompson, in particular, were close to “red-lining.” The staff was worried that an injury or severe drop-off in performance might be imminent. Myers and Kerr were informed that it was their decision, ultimately, but from what the data was showing, the Splash Brothers needed a break sooner rather than later.
Curry sat out two games, one in late February in Indiana, the other in mid-March in the high altitude of Denver. Thompson also sat out the Denver game—“I know there are people here in Denver who are probably coming to see Steph and Klay play, in particular,” Kerr said, “but unfortunately we can’t base our own team’s welfare on that”—and then sprained his right ankle three days later in a win over the Lakers. He missed the next three games, the first time in his NBA career he’d missed time due to injury. The team won all three without him, but Thompson returned to play the final 13 games of the season without issue.
Thompson, among others, had thrived under Kerr’s system. Even with the emphasis on defensive switching, even with the new, slimmer set of offensive schemes, Thompson was more proficient than ever. In January, he went supernova at Oracle against the Sacramento Kings. With Iguodala getting a night off and Curry scoring only 10, Thompson provided more than enough offensive oomph, finishing with 52 points, including 37 points in the third quarter—more than any NBA player had ever scored in one quarter. Thompson made all 13 field-goal attempts in the quarter, including nine threes. (A 10th three in the last few seconds was waved off since it came just after a whistle stopped play.)
Not two weeks later, Curry dropped 51 on Mark Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks, thanks to 10-of-16 shooting on threes. Just past the season’s halfway point, Curry had nearly 150 threes on 40.4 percent shooting, but he shot a staggering 49.3 percent on three-point attempts over the final 33 games to finish with 286 and break his NBA record of 272 set two years earlier. During an April practice just a day before the regular-season finale, Curry sank 77 three-pointers in a row and 94 of 100 overall. He also led the NBA in free-throw percentage (.914) and steals (163).
Draymond Green also finished the season strong. If his ability to do almost anything on the court was unveiled in the first half of the season, it was magnified during the second. Over the Warriors’ final 41 games, of which he played 39, Green averaged 11.7 points, 8.5 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.6 steals, an improvement in each category over the team’s first 41. The only other player to reach those statistical benchmarks over his team’s second half? Oklahoma City’s Russell Westbrook. Once you accounted for his defense, Green, with his multidimensional abilities, had become Golden State’s ultimate X-factor.
Meanwhile, harmony had once again taken root in and around the Warriors’ practice facility. As Ron Adams would work with Green on one hoop, Bruce Fraser would feed shots to Curry on another. Sammy Gelfand would go down to the court to grab rebounds for Shaun Livingston after responding to a Bob Myers email asking for any ideas he thought the Warriors should implement. And if Jerry West or Kirk Lacob happened to walk through practice, they were a welcome sight. Everyone was encouraged to offer insights, and coming to work every day didn’t feel like, well, work. This was the vision Joe Lacob had when he and Peter Guber plunked down nearly a half-billion dollars into this sad-sack organization: When everyone enjoys the work they do, the team reaps the rewards.
So far, so good.
• • •
“The most important thing,” Bob Myers once told me, “when you sit in our seat up in the front office, is that your players respond to your coach. There’s no doubt that our team responds to him. He’s got the right balance of having this competitive edge, and he’s got this great feel for the pulse of the team—when to push, when to pull, and how to sustain that through the whole season.”
Myers’s assessment of Steve Kerr was spot-on. There was every reason the Warriors could’ve cratered during the 2014–15 season, any number of decisions that could’ve backfired, but each was made with knowledge and confidence. Maybe he was learning on the fly how to be his own kind of coach, but the game of basketball? He’d known that inside and out for decades.
“Many coaches and people in their profession are constantly seeking this holy grail, and it can grate on your personality. It can create paranoia, can create insecurity,” Myers added. “[Steve] had accomplished so much as a player. Not many guys can put a ring on each finger of a hand, but that gives you confidence and a self-assuredness that isn’t arrogance or cockiness but a level of confidence. A lot of players in the NBA that are seeking a championship, they trust in him that he can provide a pathway for them to try and get that. It’s very hard to do and everything has to come together, but I think in him they see a person that has their best interest in mind, that has a perspective on basketball versus life. I think it’s refreshing for them.”
On March 16, with a month’s slate of games yet to play, Golden State became the first team in the West to clinch a playoff spot. It came while they were playing the Lakers at Oracle Arena. As a result of Oklahoma City’s loss to Dallas, the Warriors’ magic number reached zero. The news was announced during a timeout just before halftime, the word CLINCHED flashing on the in-arena video boards. They beat Los Angeles to move to 53-13.
The Warriors reeled off 10 more wins in a row to stretch their streak to a cool dozen. They finished the year with 67 victories against only 15 losses. Golden State ended up a full 11 wins better than anyone in the Western Conference and became only the 10th team in NBA history to win that many games in the regular season.
When Kerr is handed the box score over by the bench after each quarter, he mainly looks at three things: the Warriors’ assists, their turnovers, and the other team’s field-goal percentage. These are the stats that resonate most with him, and while Golden State was a middle-of-the-pack team with regard to turnovers, they led the NBA with 27.4 assists per game and held other teams’ shooting to a league-low 42.8 percent. They were also top-six in rebounds, steals, and blocks. That they ranked second in offensive efficiency wasn’t terribly surprising, but that they became the first team in 37 years to finish tops in both defensive efficiency and pace of play was utterly astounding. The Warriors were defying all the conventional maxims of modern basketball while making the sport look spirited and carefree.
Though it was widely assumed Curry would win the Most Valuable Player award, there were vocal dissenters, notably his old coach, Mark Jackson, who said he’d pick Houston’s James Harden if he had a vote. Andrew Bogut had the most honest response when asked about Jackson’s prediction coming a day after April 1: “Well, it was April Fool’s Day.” (Jackson, who worked Warriors games for ESPN all season, often needled the team. During a January broadcast, when Jeff Van Gundy gushed about the job Kerr was doing, Jackson emphasized that “you cannot disrespect the caterpillar and rave about the butterfly.”)
But Curry did win MVP easily, capturing 100 of 130 first-place votes. He was the first Warrior to earn the award since the team moved out west and only the second in franchise history, after Philadelphia rookie Wilt Chamberlain in 1960. He’d become the first player to record multiple career games of at least 50 points and 10 threes, and his per-game average of 32.7 minutes was the lowest ever recorded in an MVP season, proof positive that the team’s emphasis on health and well-being didn’t require much self-sacrifice.
Draymond Green, the accidental starter who morphed into the team’s heart and soul, finished second to San Antonio’s Kawhi Leonard for Defensive Player of the Year honors. Klay Thompson’s 239 threes were the ninth-most ever recorded in a season. Harrison Barnes played all 82 games and averaged double-digit points for the first time in his career.
With the playoffs just three days away, Golden State was battle-tested but healthy. The five starters had all played at least 65 games and were reporting no significant injuries, a testament to the Warriors’ training staff and analytics department for getting the players to buy into such new-wave methods. Before the season, Kerr proclaimed their philosophy as “strength in numbers,” a guiding principle that propelled the team to the NBA’s best record.
In preparation for the playoffs, Kerr pulled out an old chestnut, one he’d stolen from Gregg Popovich in San Antonio. The Spurs coach liked to preach the gospel of “appropriate fear,” the feeling for when you play someone you’re expected to beat. The worst thing in the world would be to give away a game to an inferior opponent. Kerr dropped that phrasing periodically over the course of the year in an effort to keep his team focused. And after barely skating by Minnesota (the league’s worst team) in the last week of the season, Kerr casually invoked it once more: “I just think they’re ready for the playoffs,” Kerr said. “They want it, and I’m very confident that when that happens, when the playoffs come, our edge will be back. Our appropriate fear, as we talk about, will be there and we’ll be sharper.”
Now, the Warriors, as the No. 1 seed in the West and possessors of the best record in all of basketball, would subsist on “appropriate fear” as far as it could possibly fuel them.