Three hours at the Oklahoma City airport is usually a recipe for a bad day, but they were some of the most pivotal moments in Steve Kerr’s post-playing career.
It was May 2014, and Kerr was in town to call the Thunder-Clippers Western Conference semifinals for TNT. He’d been itching to get out of the broadcast booth and onto a sideline. The Clippers had just eliminated the Warriors in the first round, leading to the firing of Mark Jackson.
Then-Warriors general manager Bob Myers asked Kerr if they could meet. In a matter of days, Kerr sat down with Myers, Joe Lacob, Kirk Lacob and Travis Schlenk at an airport hangar. The Warriors were in the market for a new culture, and Kerr had a PowerPoint presentation laying out one.
From 2012 to that moment, Kerr wrote down all his thoughts on coaching. What his rules for the team plane would be. What kind of defensive assistant he’d like to hire. How a player who didn’t play would have to work out postgame. The vision he had for his offense.
He still has the presentation somewhere.
“It needs an update,” Kerr said in a December interview with this news organization.
The Warriors offered him the job after his presentation. Part Phil Jackson, part Pete Carroll and Bill Walsh, the dogma of Steve Kerr was coming to Golden State.
As the Warriors welcome back members of their 2015 championship team Tuesday at Chase Center, Kerr is eight wins from passing the late Al Attles for most in franchise history. His remarkable run at the helm — four championships, a .646 winning percentage and a Coach of the Year Award — began a decade ago in that inaugural title season.
The biggest “sliding doors” moment for Kerr was turning down Phil Jackson, his former title-winning coach and mentor, in New York. He’d agreed in principle to coach the Knicks and told Jackson he was coming.
Then the Warriors stepped in.
“If I’d gone to New York, it wouldn’t have happened,” Kerr said. “They didn’t have the personnel. We would’ve run the triangle, which Phil wanted to do. And I loved the triangle. I think Derek Fisher ran it, it didn’t click and he got fired after two years. That would’ve been me. So one of the lessons I learned in this league is timing is everything.”
Steph Curry had fought like hell to keep Mark Jackson. He’d had three coaches in as many years to start his career and Jackson had helped Golden State to back-to-back playoff berths for the first time since the Run TMC era.
But Myers fired the coach because of personality conflicts and disagreements within the organization. Reports later detailed allegations of homophobia.
In his preparation for a head-coaching job, Kerr met with coaches in different sports. Right after taking the Warriors job, he visited Carroll, then the Seattle Seahawks’ coach, for training camp.
As an assistant for the 49ers earlier in his career, Carroll would sit with Bill Walsh — a consultant at the time — and pick his brain after every practice. The Super Bowl champion passed along Walsh’s teachings to Kerr.
Carroll explained to Kerr in his office that coaching isn’t the plays you draw up in a huddle, but rather the values you hold and how you make them come alive within a team. How a great coach needs to be “uncommonly consistent” to prevent big games from feeling too big — another Walsh lesson.
None of that had ever been verbalized to Kerr before.
“It was a fascinating conversation and one of the most important lessons of my life,” Kerr said.
Carroll asked Kerr to think of the values he believes are most important to him as a human being. At his hotel later that night, he jotted down 10 before whittling his list down to four: joy, competitiveness, mindfulness and compassion.
“What Pete explained to me is it’s not words on a wall,” Kerr said. “You don’t come in and write joy on a wall. You have joy every day. If it’s a real value, then you’re a joyful person. I love the game, I love life, I love the camaraderie. Love the process of work.
“So that has to be on display every day in your building. That’s what I think the great programs, organizations — the Bulls with Phil Jackson. His culture was so unique to him. The Spurs with Gregg Popovich, it was so unique with him. Palpable. You can feel it. The players feel that, it comes alive every day and it’s not a bunch of (BS). It’s real. And then you can sort through all this adversity because you have trust.”
Carroll called Kerr a “great study.” Even the wherewithal to go beyond the bounds of his sport to seek knowledge reflects Kerr’s curiosity and competitiveness, his desire to find an edge.
Kerr had to put it all into practice without any coaching experience. Carroll related; when he first started coaching, he “didn’t know nothing.” It took getting fired from the Patriots and finding success at USC for him to have an epiphany about coaching philosophy, which he relayed to Kerr.
“I didn’t want him to have to suffer through the struggles of realizing what the hell you don’t know, what you don’t know about all this job calls for,” Carroll said.“It’s so much different than even GMs think, what owners think. I feel like they really struggle with understanding how complicated it is. Because it isn’t just Xs and Os and two-minute drills, the calls down the stretch and timeouts. It isn’t that. That’s just an aspect of the job. So much of it is knowing where you come from and knowing yourself so you can lead.”
After his training camp trip, Kerr made a point to visit every Warrior player he was about to coach (except for the notoriously hard-to-pin-down Klay Thompson). He flew to Australia to meet with Andrew Bogut. Stopped in Miami to see Harrison Barnes. Had dinner with Andre Iguodala at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. Drove from his home in San Diego to Beverly Hills to connect with David Lee.
Kerr wanted to explain his vision and his values, to set expectations and strike connections before the season began. He had the big-picture blueprint and years of experience as a player and front office executive, but had still never coached an NBA practice.
The early days of preseason camp were “chaos,” Kerr remembers. He wanted to install a completely new offense, replacing Jackson’s isolation-heavy system with elements of the triangle, Utah’s split action, Spurs concepts, Mike D’Antoni pace, and principles from Lenny Wilkens. After every practice and game, he displayed the number of total passes made on a whiteboard to hammer home their ball-movement identity.
Kerr leaned on his longtime friend and former Arizona teammate Bruce Fraser as a confidant and sounding board. Some of his anxiety over whether it would all work was alleviated when the Warriors dominated the Clippers in their first preseason game, then ripped off a 21-2 start to the season.
One of Kerr’s first moves as a coach was convincing Andre Iguodala, their All-Star free agent acquisition that year, to come off the bench. He inserted Draymond Green into the starting lineup when David Lee got hurt in the preseason and never turned back. Golden State went from last in the league in passes per game to ninth.
Even as the team was winning, there were always challenges — especially for a rookie head coach. Personalities to manage, injuries, newfound attention for Curry in his first MVP season. The values had to persist. Uncommonly consistent. It didn’t hurt that Curry, in many regards a basketball kindred soul with Kerr, completely bought in.
“I think we had a pretty unique culture that was based on Steph,” Kerr said. “But also based on the vibe that we had in our building every day, which was a pretty unique combination of competitiveness and joy. That wasn’t by accident, it was purposeful.”
The Warriors went 67-15 that season, but the coaching staff felt the team was hitting a lull around February. Kerr called a meeting at the practice facility in Oakland to challenge his players, telling them to regain their focus and prepare for what was to come in the playoffs. He told the team he felt they had what they needed to win it all.
“He’s not a type of coach that’s a ‘rah-rah, I’m going to inspire my guys today, see what I can get out of them,’” Fraser said. “He’s a sensible leader, only speaks the harsh truth when it needs to be spoken. He uses his words wisely.”
Kerr didn’t draw on his past as a five-time champion with the Bulls and Spurs in his speech, but his message carried weight because of it. He was delivering it to an audience that hadn’t yet broken through.
And for the first time since 1975, they proved him right. They did have what it takes to win a title.
“Dream season,” Kerr said. “We won 67 games, never got taken to a seventh game in the playoffs. You can’t script that.”
