The team’s arena – loud during a January loss from the Dave Cowens era, loud during a championship ring ceremony – was as boisterous as ever during Golden State’s season-opening win. The faithful all wore the same colored t-shirts, the ball was whipping around the perimeter, and Stephen Curry notched a career first quarter high of 24 points as the W’s raced out to a win over New Orleans. Andrew Bogut, as he does, received stitches. Draymond Green got a technical. Warriors acted like Warriors.
And Kerr couldn’t be a part of it. Still reeling from what was a debilitating back surgery and subsequent spinal fluid leak, he had to remove himself from the proceedings while letting assistant Luke Walton run the team.
As you’d expect from a competitor, on the night he was given his sixth championship ring, it wasn’t easy to watch from the locker room. From Monte Poole at CSN Bay Area:
“Fortunately, prospects for the long term are great,” Kerr said. “I know I’m on the right path, on the right track. I’m very confident that I will be back this season, and I can’t wait. It’s killing me. And it’s killing me not to be out there tonight. I’m excited to be part of the ceremony, but I’m really disappointed not to be coaching.”
[…]
“I am feeling better, so that’s the good news,” Kerr said. “The bad news is I’m not feeling well enough to coach yet. It’s hard because I don’t know when that will be. So there’s no timetable. It’s not a sprained ankle, two-to-four-weeks type of thing. When I feel better, I’ll feel better.
“It’s very frustrating, but I am improving.”
That’s good to hear, and it is a long season, but one can understand why Kerr would be champing at the bit.
Steve has worn quite a few hats in his NBA career. He was a five-time champion as a player, an executive in Phoenix, a broadcaster with Turner Sports and even an NBA journalist at Yahoo Sports and the late NBAtalk.com. Though Kerr will attempt to travel with the Warriors as he recovers, this marks the first time since he entered the league in 1988 that Kerr won’t be able to perform his expected duties.
The switch in roles, expectedly, is not sitting well with the man who led the Warriors to the franchise’s first title in 40 years last season. From the Associated Press:
''It's good to be back around the team quite a bit,'' Kerr said. ''Prospects long-term are great. I know I'm on the right path, I'm on the right track. I'm very confident I'll be back this season. And I can't wait. It's killing me not to be out there tonight. I'm excited to be part of the ceremony but I'm really disappointed not to be coaching. I've got to be patient and that's probably not my greatest virtue right now.''
Every game in the West counts. The Warriors may have put up a legend-level point differential last season on the team’s way toward 67 wins, but a high end (given good health) parity still reigns amongst the top half-dozen Western contenders. An absent head coach won’t affect this or any other team in the same way that a month-long injury absence to a franchise player would, but one has to be careful when navigating a brutal Conference schedule.
This is a long way of saying, “damn, Steve Kerr must be in a lot of pain right now.”
Kerr first underwent back surgery in July, and a series of setbacks led to another operation in September. He had hoped to be fully mended by the time training camp started around the end of that month, but Kerr could not return as his players did once camp opened.
His interim replacement, Luke Walton, is a relative neophyte. Just 35-years old, he wasn’t even Kerr’s lead assistant during last year’s championship run, and his move to the bench in 2014-15 was his first coaching gig.
None of this matters, according to Kerr. From Ray Ratto at CSN Bay Area:
But he also had these pearls from Kerr right before he took the floor: “We won 67 games last year, and I didn’t know what I was doing at all.”
That’s cute and very Kerr-like, but this was hardly the case.
The Warriors coach entered the ring fully knowing what he wanted out of his Warriors. He hired Walton to help implement parts of the triangle offense that both of them thrived in, he moved former All-Stars Andre Iguodala and then David Lee to the bench, and amped up the team’s ball movement and offensive efficiency without losing (in fact, actually improving) its defensive aptitude.
Kerr’s “aw, shucks” approach will never be anything less than charming, but in employing him as head coach the Warriors turned their fortunes over to a rather large basketball brain.
In handing the reins over to Luke Walton, though, the Warriors have done the same. Walton retired ten years before Kerr, and while he may not have taken the same decade-long circuitous route toward becoming a rookie assistant coach alongside a rookie head coach as Steve did, the Warriors are in good hands.
Still, it would be nice to see Steve Kerr be able to coach what he’s helped create.
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