Whenever Steve Kerr decides to call it a career, he’s going to go down as one of the greatest winners in NBA history. He won five rings as a player as part of two all-time great teams, the Michael Jordan-era Bulls and the Tim Duncan-era Spurs, and to complement, he’s added four more titles as the coach of the Warriors.
Advertisement
Despite his decades of success, Kerr is as humble as they come. On his recent appearance on the Glue Guys podcast, he noted that a coach is only as good as his best players and like his mentor Gregg Popovich, he’s been lucky enough to hitch his wagon to a legend, too.
Kerr has coached the Warriors for 11 years, a rare bit of longevity in today’s game, and he credited Steph Curry with allowing him to do it.
“I’m well aware that the reason I’m still here is that Steph Curry’s still here,” he said. “I’m not being modest, I’m just telling the truth.” He then used Pop, a man thought by many to be the greatest coach of all-time, as an example of someone who also acknowledges his own luck in being paired with a top-level Hall-of-Famer.
“Gregg Popovich is one of my best friends and mentors and every time we sit down to dinner he holds up his wine glass and he says, ‘Here’s to Tim Duncan,’ and everyone toasts Tim Duncan. And I love it because it’s genuine, and he’s basically telling us, ‘The only reason we are all here is the lottery fell our way. We got Tim Duncan, other people didn’t.'”
Kerr knows that he was just as lucky to coach the greatest shooter who’s ever lived.“That’s how I feel about Steph,” he said.
“If I didn’t have Steph, I would have been like every other NBA coach and lasted a few years, and then gone somewhere else and coached somewhere else. So I’m incredibly lucky to have this partnership with Steph and he provides this stability and continuity with the organization that just makes everybody’s job easier.”
Kerr won his first coaching title in 2015 and the game has changed a lot in the decade since. Having Steph has allowed the Warriors to navigate those changing waters, even as the NBA has become more of what Kerr called “a developmental league” as more younger players are relied on and practice time is limited.
“And frankly, I’m not great with that. I’m an older coach … I’m a disciple of Phil [Jackson] and Pop and so I lean on the young [coaches] to really install great development drills, decision-making stuff … things that I never did or knew how to teach.”
It’s difficult to quibble with Kerr’s success, though the Warriors have had some issues developing young talent. The infamous ‘two timelines’ approach technically resulted in a championship in 2022 but it was mostly the old guard, led by Steph, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, that brought that one home.
As of right now, Jonathan Kuminga is bursting with talent but he hasn’t fully developed into a star in Golden State, which is why he and the team are at an impasse right now about his future. Moses Moody is a rotation player but hasn’t totally taken off and James Wiseman, who was taken with the No. 2 overall pick ahead of players such as LaMelo Ball and Tyrese Haliburton, turned out to be a bust.
If the Warriors hope to win their fifth title of the Steph era, they’ll likely need more than just Steph, Draymond and Jimmy Butler to do it. Whether that means bringing back Kuminga and actually trusting him in big spots, trading him for a useful piece or further developing Moody and Brandin Podziemski, we shall see.
