It should not have taken a month and change for the Golden State Warriors to figure out what they wanted to do with head coach Steve Kerr, nor should it have taken that long for Kerr to figure out what to do with them. If management wanted to punish their Hall of Fame-bound head coach for allegedly mismanaging Jonathan Kuminga (we’ll wait for you in the back to settle down), they should have canned him the day after their play-in loss to Phoenix. If Kerr was fed up with his bosses sniping about how he could not somehow draw up a scheme that negated the ravages of advanced age and bad health, or find a fix for a roster with more questions than answers, he should have dropped his pants on his way out of the season recap meeting and hit the road for either a lifetime of golf or an NBA job without the comforts of Stephen Curry. Kerr, we needn’t add here, is not insane.
So no, neither of those events occurred. In the end, logic, common sense, and good old inertia won out, and the 32 days didn’t matter in the end. Reports claimed this process took three actual weeks, but that doesn’t include the week and half after the season ended when nothing moved except for the rumor mill. Nevertheless, whatever handwringing and agonized forehead rubs were expended by all parties en route, the result was as it should have been. A few meetings, a little golf, and voila! The status is quo. The center holds; the man who coached the Golden State Warriors last year will coach them in the next.
And yet this is still a story of at least minimal consequence, if only because it never got the automatic resolution it deserved. Kerr and Curry are a matched pair, and each helped the other build the last great NBA dynasty; you may quarrel amongst yourselves about the who-did-what ratio, but there’s no arguing the broader point. And, as each man was both comfortable and competitive, it seemed appropriate that neither would consider leaving without the other. Curry isn’t leaving, and now Kerr isn’t, either; this makes sense. But those 32 days didn’t feel nearly that inevitable, and a vacuum demands to be filled, and so we got the fevered specu-guessing that we got.
Maybe owner Joe Lacob didn’t have the stomach for the public crapstorm he knew would follow him imposing his limited knowledge upon his tactical betters. He may have had frustrations over the previous failed attempts to refresh the team, but another helpful rule of thumb is “The best way to make things worse is have the owner get his way.” Moving on from Kerr without Curry’s insistence would have gone over like a toaster in a hot tub, and even a middling performer knows that once an audience turns on you, it never finds its way back. Lacob isn’t even that; the man made his money in venture capital.
As it stands, Lacob has never really faced any significant measure of criticism in his time as principal owner, for the perfectly sensible reason that, in the immortal words of Green Lantern, “Rings are good.” Forcing Kerr out for some passing Bickerstaff or a wild hair on a rogue Van Gundy would have ended that run of goodwill. It was Kerr who chose not to extend his contract beyond this season, although it certainly could also be that Lacob helped make that choice by not offering one. Maybe both blinked.
Or maybe Kerr wasn’t yet ready for spending his days cleaning the pool furniture and punching out of greenside bunkers. Maybe the essential logic of coming into a job working alongside a fully actualized Curry means going out with him. Maybe he is trying to keep Draymond Green active and playing and therefore off the airwaves as one of his well-noted acts of public-spiritedness; it would be consistent with Kerr’s many laudable public stances on social justice. Maybe he wants to be the one to squeeze the last bit of juice from the NBA’s eighth dynasty. Maybe he just wants to end his career with forehead wrinkles you can hide a quarter in. All of these are his right.
Kerr certainly could have left with his legacy secure, even after the wind-down of the last few seasons. He modified and improved Curry’s partnership with Klay Thompson, which had been established under Mark Jackson, and found the fullest value in Green, if sometimes at noteworthy cost. Kerr also got the last and maybe best moments out of Andrew Bogut, Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livingston, and David West, made noteworthy supporting staff out of Harrison Barnes, Gary Payton The Younger, Kevon Looney, and a legion of others; he made Andrew Wiggins into a NBA champ. He even found ways to meld megawatt stars like Kevin Durant and Jimmy Butler into a highly hierarchical roster, even if the Durant masterstroke only had a two-year shelf life and Butler’s barely got going at all. In fairness, Kerr also struggled to integrate basically any younger player into that structure or, depending upon how you view Kuminga, James Wiseman, and Jordan Poole, just was given players who were always going to struggle to find a useful role. But Kerr’s Golden State teams authentically changed the way the sport is played, and also won a lot; the mission was very much accomplished. And yet it goes on.
We’re sure that the parties involved will assemble a semi-coherent story/press conference narrative at some point in the next day or so, and it might well explain how they needed 32 days to do what should have taken an hour, tops. But the fact of it is that the only compelling reason to fire Kerr would have been if Curry had demanded a new coach, for this is his franchise in more meaningful ways than almost any player in NBA history. (There are other viable claimants to this throne, but you can start your own bar fights.) Curry has never evinced any dissatisfaction with Kerr specifically, either because he is content with his coach or because he does not air his annoyances with anyone above the level of Ed Malloy. On the organization’s end, there might not be much more to it than that.
That is just how it goes. Basketball coaches are beholden to their best players in ways that other sports are not, and as long as Curry is good with Kerr, Kerr is good by definition. In NBA history, only Gregg Popovich, Jerry Sloan, Erik Spoelstra, Red Auerbach, Red Holzman, and Al Attles have lasted longer with one team and walked out under their own prerogatives than Kerr would have had he left after last season; they also combined for 23 of the 80 NBA titles. But even if you want to believe that Kerr didn’t deserve to go out on his volition, you would be mad not to concede that Curry gets the deciding vote. Even a venture capitalist would be compelled to acknowledge Lacob’s very public indebtedness to the man most responsible for turning his $450 million into an $11 billion franchise, not including the stray $780M in value Lacob picked up owning the Valkyries from a $50 million outlay. Without the first, Lacob doesn’t own the second. Quod erat demonstrandum. Billionaires gonna billionaire; everyone deserves a raise but only the boss actually gets one.
These last strange 32 days (or three weeks, if you think the clock starts with the first meeting) are probably without consequence in the end, and what comes next likely won’t change all that much. The post-Curry transition now looks more like a post-Curry/Kerr transition; the task of getting younger and more dynamic remains tomorrow’s priority. This is not new; the last three Golden State squads Kerr coached were all play-in teams, aging audibly as they backed further and further into a comfortable cul de sac after years on their own personal Autobahn. The organization has quite literally never had it so good, but the Warriors also did not get the Toronto Maple Leafs’ horseshoe-in-the-shorts draft lottery luck. They will pick 11th, for all the good that does them.
The Warriors know that they have to change. Kerr and Curry are not finished, but they are getting there; this draft and the following ones will require a much better longterm result than the drafts that delivered Kuminga, Poole, and Wiseman. The holdovers from the previous administration are at least still around, but it is more meaningful that the major players in the next generation are not yet in the building .
A number of interesting things might have happened here, in short, but something much more normal happened instead. The Warriors did what they were bound to do, Kerr did what he was always inclined to do, and Curry performed what he was destined to do—voting his controlling stock without ever issuing a single ultimatum. It’s nice when everyone reaches the obvious conclusion in the end, even if the end could have been reached either 32 days or three weeks ago. You can decide which number satisfies you more.
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