Has Steve Kerr Had Enough?
Plainspokenness is an endangered attribute in pro sports. Players and coaches have become maddeningly mealy-mouthed, striving to avoid upsetting agents, sponsors, owners, fans, thin-skinned politicians, and whoever else might object. Not so with the Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, who has publicly dubbed Donald Trump a “blowhard” who uses “racist, misogynist” words and is “ill-suited” to be President. (Trump, for his part, has called Kerr a “scared” “little boy.”) Kerr’s success is as rare as his candor. “I’m the luckiest guy in the N.B.A.’s history,” he said last weekend, as his twelfth coaching season came to a close, earlier than desired, during the play-in round. Kerr has won nine N.B.A. championships—more than any franchise but the Lakers and the Celtics—and counted Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Gregg Popovich, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and Jimmy Butler among his coaches, teammates, and players. Not a bad group of co-workers.
Butler’s A.C.L. tear, back in January, effectively doomed Kerr’s already slim chances of winning a tenth title with a graying core of star players. Ten rings would put him just three behind Phil Jackson, who was Kerr’s coach on the nineties Chicago Bulls team that became the N.B.A.’s first truly global brand. It was easy to miss Kerr back then—a slim six-foot-three guard coming off the bench, good for a couple of threes, no dunks. Then he hit the game-winner with six seconds left to seal the Bulls’ fifth title, in 1997, and made a daring little joke at Jordan’s expense during the subsequent victory parade. “Phil told Michael, he said, ‘Michael, I want you to take the last shot,’ ” Kerr began. “Michael said, ‘You know, Phil, I don’t feel real comfortable in these situations. So, maybe we ought to go in another direction. Why don’t we go to Steve?’ So I thought to myself, Well, guess I’ve got to bail Michael out again.” Jordan, famous for taking things personally, just chuckled.
I met Kerr a few days ago at his modest office in the Chase Center, where the Warriors play, in San Francisco. He had just finished conducting his annual exit interviews with players, staff, and management, following the season’s end. A small wooden placard on his desk read “WINNING IS GOOD”—a joking riff, he explained, on the line from “Animal House” that “knowledge is good.” The office’s whiteboard walls, frequently covered in a granddaughter’s doodling, noted Kerr’s “core values”: “COMPETITIVENESS, JOY, MINDFULNESS, COMPASSION.” There were also a few roller bags, about which Kerr—whose contract just expired, and whose future with the organization is an open question—only said, “It’s a long story.” Over the course of two hours, we discussed his hopes for next year, his complicated relationship with Draymond Green, the potential benefits of eliminating the three-point shot, and whether he might give politics a try. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
I don’t typically sleep in the childhood bedroom of my interview subjects, but your mom, Ann, was kind enough to host me in yours, in L.A., in 2018, when I wrote a piece about her for the magazine. Now in her nineties, Ann is the director of the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program in Southern California, a lover of Middle Eastern culture, a morning swimmer, a rope swinger, a memoirist, and, as she says, the mother of “two Ph.D.s, an M.B.A., & an N.B.A.”
[Laughs.] That’s her line.
I was saddened to learn that the house where I stayed, and where you grew up, burned in the Palisades Fire. What was your childhood like there?
Man, what a place to grow up: Pacific Palisades. My dad was a professor of Middle East politics and got the job at U.C.L.A., and we lived in a couple of other houses before my parents found that house. It’s got a panoramic view: Los Angeles all the way up to Malibu and the ocean. It’s amazing. Today there’s no way a professor at U.C.L.A. could afford it. A very different time economically, different time politically.
Ann mentioned coming home from a weekend away, during your teen-age years, to find that her potted plants smelled like beer.
That would have been when I was in high school. And, yeah, I may or may not have authorized a party for all my friends and forty or so extra people.
The family also spent time in Cairo and Beirut, where you were born.
Mostly in the Palisades with intermittent sabbaticals from my dad. We spent time in, let’s see: a year in Aix-en-Provence, in the South of France, when I was in kindergarten; three years in Cairo. Then back to L.A. When I returned to Cairo, for ninth and tenth grade, my dad was doing research and writing a book and teaching at the American University in Cairo.
Was there a basketball culture in Cairo then?
I went to an American prep school called Cairo American College. I still have great friends from there. For ninth and tenth grades, I played on the school team. Every year we would fly to Greece, to Athens, to play in the tournament against other schools in the region. That was the highlight. This would have been, like, 1979, 1980. If there was a basketball gym in the entire country of Egypt, we never found it. So our games were played on dirt courts. Basketball was not really popular in Cairo, but these sporting clubs would field men’s teams and we usually were playing against players a lot older than us. And bigger. But we had the advantage because we all grew up playing basketball. The inverse was true in soccer. The American kids would take on the Egyptian kids at our school and we would just get absolutely destroyed.
You learned how to shoot in the wind, I guess?
The wind and the pebbles that were on the dirt courts. Later on, I had to deal with the gaps in the floor at the Boston Garden.
Your dad, Malcolm Kerr, was assassinated by the Islamic Jihad Organization, a wing of Hezbollah, in 1984, in Beirut, where he was the president of the American University of Beirut. He loved the Arab world and attempted to foster cross-cultural respect and understanding. I’m curious what qualities and interests you inherited from him.
I think I inherited his patience. Growing up, we would host people from all walks of life, back-yard dinner parties, in the Palisades or in Cairo. I was a really shy kid. I really never said anything. So I just observed a lot. And I remember so many nights where somebody would be dominating the conversation and my dad would just patiently wait. And it always struck me just how humble and quiet he was. He was so smart, but he knew when to speak. And I think I learned a lot observing his patience and his dignity.
A different kind of leadership than you see nowadays.
I think we’re as weak as we’ve ever been as a country, at least in a long time, because our leadership is so misguided. There’s a lack of humility, a lack of dignity, a lack of understanding of the world, a lack of embracing other perspectives. The belligerence.
How have you processed the war in Lebanon and Iran right now?
My dad was killed by Iranian proxies forty-two years ago. I have no regard for the Iranian regime whatsoever. But the answer does not lie in starting a war and killing innocent people. Imagine being a parent of one of the one hundred and seventy-five girls who died when their school was bombed. Their loss, their suffering . . . How are they going to feel about America? Violence begets violence. We’ve seen it in Israel and Lebanon as well. There was an opening for Israel to handle their business with the Palestinians diplomatically that would have solidified the Abraham Accords and allowed stronger alliances with Arab countries that would have really cornered Iran. Instead, Israel sought revenge for October 7th and now seventy-two thousand Palestinians have been killed and Israeli settlers are taking over the West Bank illegally, with the approval of Israel’s government and the U.S. Ambassador, Mike Huckabee. That’s not a path to any sort of peace or security for Israel or the rest of the Middle East.
How did basketball function in your life following your father’s murder? You were playing at the University of Arizona. Did basketball help you grieve, or distract you from grief?
Part of how I grieved. I found out about my dad’s death through a phone call from a university colleague at 3 A.M., and I went to practice the next day. It was the worst moment of my life. It was shocking, even though I knew the danger. My dad was so well respected there: so many Arab friends, spoke fluent Arabic. He was fostering good will between America and Lebanon. He was a victim of political terrorism, near the very beginning of this current era of Islamic extremist terrorism and animosity toward America. The Iranian Revolution happened in ’79, when we were living in Cairo.
What do you remember?
I remember the Shah’s kids were suddenly students at Cairo American College because the Shah was deposed and went to Egypt. So we’re reading about the Iranian Revolution, and the hostages, and all of a sudden there’s these three kids walking around campus with security. Word got around, but I had no idea of the political significance of that moment. I was just watching the news like everybody else, saying, “My God, why are Americans being held hostage in Iran?” That event, along with the Grand Mosque seizure in 1979, created a backlash against Western thought, Western ideology. Those events were the beginning of what we’re experiencing today.
When did you realize that you could play in the N.B.A.?
My senior year at Arizona, we had a great team. I started to dream a little bit: maybe I could sneak into the N.B.A. for a year, have a cup of coffee and be able to tell my kids I played.
You ultimately played for half a dozen teams, including Michael Jordan’s Bulls.
I came off the bench. I literally never started a single game in five years. I played twenty to twenty-five minutes. And I fit perfectly into the offense that Phil Jackson wanted to play, which was the triangle offense. My role was facilitator, passer, long-range shooter: shoot when I’m open, pass when I’m not, never turn the ball over. I was able to thrive in Chicago based on a set of circumstances—ultimately playing next to Michael Jordan and feeding off of him because he attracted so much attention.
I was surprised to learn that you punched Michael Jordan during a practice, in 1995. Your mother described this fistfight to me as the two of you “rubbing elbows a bit.” Is that right?
I like to say, I hit him in the fist with my eye.
How do you compare Jordan, your teammate, to LeBron James, who entered the league the year you retired?
LeBron’s brilliance doesn’t lie in the same skill set that Michael’s did. It lies in more of a holistic game where he dominates with his pace and his athleticism and his passing. I’ve always felt scoring is secondary for LeBron, but he’s the greatest scorer in the history of the N.B.A.!
Almost incidentally.
Yeah, incidentally. Some of that is longevity: he’s a machine. I mean, I think he’s literally the greatest athlete on the face of the planet and in the course of human history. Playing with Michael, I saw the killer instinct, the emotional dominance he had over not only the other team but the officials, the entire arena. I don’t see that with LeBron. So they’re different, as far as the emotional part of it. Everybody came into a series against Michael knowing they were going to lose. There’s never been anybody like that. Maybe Bill Russell. But I’ve never felt the same way on a basketball floor as I did with Michael.
You retired from playing in 2003, after fifteen seasons and five titles, the last of which you won with San Antonio. I should note that, while you didn’t shoot the volume of threes that players do now, you were very accurate: your career percentage of 45.4 from behind the arc is the best in N.B.A. history. Steph’s career number is around forty-two per cent right now. Do you ever rub that in with him?
Given that he has provided four extra championship rings for my collection, I have not ventured down that path yet.
When did you know you’d coach?
When I was playing in college, I thought I would coach. I didn’t think I’d play in the N.B.A. I thought, I love the game so much, family of teachers, I’ll probably be a coach.
You felt like you saw the game well?
Yeah. And I loved it. I was obsessed. And that played out, unfortunately, in beating myself up. It mattered so much to me that I was really self-critical. And I had to learn the hard way, how defeating that was. And so being that obsessed with something and that competitive, it helped me, but it hurt me, too.
How did Gregg Popovich and Phil Jackson influence you?
Both guys had a similar philosophy, but they went about it in completely different ways. Pop’s a military guy. Phil is a hippie from Montana who wanted to embrace his Zen side and his love of Native American history. Completely different human beings, but they both had this wonderful sense of perspective where they taught how important it was to do your absolute best every day to become your best. And at the same time, how meaningless a basketball game actually was in the bigger scheme of things. They found that balance.
I’ve heard speculation that Draymond Green, your temperamental forward, might coach one day. He’s fascinating: a second-round pick who doesn’t shoot that well; who isn’t super athletic or tall; whose box score doesn’t stand out; who’s prone to altercations; but who has also been described as the linchpin of some of the best teams in N.B.A. history. How?
He’s the best defensive player I’ve ever seen. And that’s saying a lot, given that I played with Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman. The modern game demands so much more than it did in the nineties. You have to be able to guard all five positions, because there’s so much pace and energy and crossmatches. You race back on defense, you’ve got to guard the guy in front of you. And then there’s the “pick-on” game: the opposing team is going to bring the weakest defender into every pick-and-roll to gain an advantage. Draymond, he can guard any action, any position, any player. And he can also blow up the play behind the play if he’s not involved in the action because of his brain, his speed, his reach. I think he’s no more than six-five and a half—
With a seven-foot wingspan.
Seven-one wingspan, incredible strength. He wins every jump ball because he’s quicker to anticipate what’s happening, which means he’s getting to the rotation faster. He’s seeing what’s happening faster. He’s just a step ahead of the other nine guys.
So, a coach?
I don’t know that he’ll coach. He definitely has the brain for it. I don’t know if he has the patience. He’s an incredibly passionate, emotional guy, and that passion and energy has frequently gotten him in trouble. And I love him. I think he’s a really good-hearted person with an incredible brain, but if he wants to coach he’s going to have to learn how to control some of that emotion, that desire, and that fire that burns within him, and it’s not an easy thing to do.
You’ve come to blows—
Yeah. I mean, people pulling us apart. And in my first five years, we would get into three knockdown, dragouts a year. Part of it was, I just had to show the rest of the team that I’m in charge. You have to do things by a set of standards. It’s a community that you’re building, not just a team—a little society with values and standards and expectations. And then you’re a community that has to police itself. The coach has to demand certain behaviors, certain habits. So then for a long time we had a truce. I understood him so well. He understood me. But this year we had a major blowout in December. He’s such a unique person. There’s things he’s done that I can never forgive him for, and yet I will do anything for him.
What Steph Curry does on the court is more readily appreciable. How do you compare him with Jordan?
He’s an incredible leader. Michael was an incredible leader himself, but it’s an entirely different approach. I mean, Steph’s compassion for his teammates, his joy in life, his joy for celebrating everybody else’s accomplishments is so powerful. But without Draymond’s competitive edge and fight, I don’t think we win all those championships. They were the perfect complement to each other. Then we had Andre Iguodala, Klay Thompson. When Kevin [Durant] got here, our talent level went to a different level—different planet, really. And I think that the team that won in ’17-18 was as good as or better than any team in the history of the game.
You’ve also coached the U.S. men’s Olympic team. Celtics fans want to know why you didn’t really play Jayson Tatum, one of the league’s superstars, in the 2024 Olympics. You said that it was a “math problem.” What did you mean?
We had LeBron James and Kevin Durant ahead of him. Both guys had incredible F.I.B.A. experience. They’re two of the greatest players of all time. Jayson happened to be playing the same position as them. If I had just said, “I'm going to play the best five guys” or whatever, then, yeah, Jayson’s probably out there. But you’re trying to put together a team. And so, ironically, the guys I played ahead of him were also Boston Celtics: Derrick White and Jrue Holiday. We needed guys who were on-ball defenders, facilitators, who would make Steph and LeBron and Kevin better. Jayson wasn’t really suited for that role as well as those other guys. And that’s the whole point of U.S.A. Basketball: take twelve of the best players on earth and try to make it work.
The conspiracy theorists claim you were trying to foment discord among the Celtics.
Yeah. The 2020 election was rigged, too.
Good segue. You’ve been refreshingly outspoken on politics over the years. The day after Trump’s first election, in 2016, you delivered what you called a “rant” at a Warriors press conference, describing your disgust and disappointment in the result.
He was establishing this new tone of communication that we were going to have in this country. I was so disgusted that I didn’t hold back. I’ve learned that I need to be better in terms of representing our organization in a way that I could still let my feelings be known but not get too personal. I’m representing a large group of people.
Are you referring to when you called him a “blowhard” who was “ill-suited” to the office?
“Buffoon,” I think. What really got me was the debates with Hillary [Clinton], where he stalked her from behind. It was so shocking. And there was a live audience that reminded me of “The Jerry Springer Show” or something.
Foreshadowing.
In my life, up until that time, there had been a sense of decorum expected in the Presidential campaigns. When McCain ran against Obama, there was a town hall and someone said to McCain, “Obama is a terrible man.” And he said, “No, he’s a fine man.” That was what I grew up with. Reagan and Tip O’Neill got together every week—Democratic Speaker of the House, Republican President—knowing they had to collaborate to get stuff done. There was a sense of decency, that people were watching, that we wanted our politics to embody a certain dignity, regardless of policy, and regardless of even corruption. Nixon gets impeached and both parties agree we can’t have this. We lost that. And I don’t think it’s all Trump’s fault. I think it was happening before Trump: the forces in social media, the forces in our country, the division.
He’s a symptom, in other words?
Yeah, but he definitely has taken advantage of that to gain and to consolidate power. And he’s using it to drive a wedge between all of us. He’s not the only one who’s done that, but he’s the President. He’s got the most power. But calling the President a buffoon, I kind of regret that, even though I felt it in my heart. It’s better to point out policy decisions, but also American values. What’s wrong with the things that he does.
In 2019, Trump called you a “scared” “little boy.” He was referring to your choice not to comment on the N.B.A.’s reprimand of Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s tweet in support of anti-government protesters in Hong Kong. Obviously, Trump relished what he perceived to be hypocrisy on the part of both the N.B.A. broadly, as a purported supporter of free speech and social justice, and you specifically, as one of the freest speakers in the league. You’d declined to get involved in the conflict, citing a lack of information on the issue. How do you feel about that stance now?
I gave a really weak answer. I was trying to walk the line.
You regret that?
Yeah. I was wrong. We had a lot of players on our team that were doing business in China. A lot of our players would go there off-season. The N.B.A. had this huge relationship with China. But, of course, thousands of American companies had trade and relations with China. And so the N.B.A. just got caught up in all of this and I didn’t handle it well. I was trying to walk the company line and not make the N.B.A. mad.
I remember seeing your remarks after the Uvalde school shootings, in 2022, during the Western Conference finals—in which you said that our country is held hostage by senators unwilling to vote for widely popular and commonsense gun reform—and thinking, first, this is what informed and impassioned advocacy looks like, and, second, that you had a future in politics if you wanted one.
Well, that’s flattering and I appreciate it. I don’t have any desire to go into politics. I love basketball. This is my world. All of my friends and my people are in this world. And whether I keep coaching the Warriors or not, I imagine I’ll be involved in basketball.
Beyond gun violence, what are you most concerned about in today’s America?
When I finished college almost forty years ago, if you went to school and got a degree, you could get a job and you could buy a house. Now that’s out of reach for most people between student debt and home prices and the economy slanted toward the very, very top one per cent. We don’t really have a middle class, and we don’t have what used to represent the American Dream, which was: you can do better than your parents. We’re going backward on all that. Our family is lucky. I’m in a position where my family can live well. But there are millions of people out there, young people who are looking at the horizon and saying, “I did everything I was told I needed to do, and I can’t buy a house, and I can’t chase my dream.” Think about what that means for the stability of communities and cities and a whole country.
Meanwhile, thanks to huge media deals, global expansion, and sponsorship, the N.B.A. is more profitable and valuable than ever. The average team is now worth four to five billion dollars, with the Warriors valued at around twice that. Basketball has become the third most popular global sport—
What’s second?
Cricket.
O.K. Yeah. Soccer, cricket, basketball. The number of people in India and Pakistan.
And Steph Curry’s face is probably more recognizable than that of every U.S. senator, and maybe the Vice-President.
I agree.
All of which is great news for Adam Silver and everyone else pulling a paycheck from the league. But I want to ask you about some macro challenges facing the N.B.A., starting with injuries. Since the 2019-20 season, the top thirty or so highest-paid players have missed between a quarter and a third of games. For most or all of this season, Giannis, Jimmy, Tatum, Lillard, Irving, Embiid, Haliburton, Anthony Davis, and Jalen Williams have been sidelined. What can be done?
I think we need to play fewer games. I don’t think that’s going to happen, because fewer games is less revenue and you’d have to have everybody agree—players, coaches, management, some of the investment banks that are funding some of the teams—and the purchase prices of these franchises now is so out of control that you’ve got billions of dollars at stake, and nobody who’s counting the beans wants to shorten the season. But I think we make a ton of money already, and I think we really need to be concerned about the product. We could shave some games off the schedule, which would allow for more rest, more practice.
How many?
I’d say ten. Talking with people who have really researched it, you can do ten, and what that would do for player health. . . . The old N.B.A. fans go, “Well, yeah, but we’ve been playing eighty-two games forever!” But we have the data now that shows the players are running faster and farther than ever before by dramatic margins because of the three-point shot, because teams crash the offensive glass now instead of just turning and running back. Because of the pace, because of analytics, we’ve learned that the quicker you can get a shot up, the more efficient your offense is. In the old days, they used to tell us the exact opposite. What we’ve learned is that the later you go, the worse your efficiency becomes. With all the athleticism, all the switching now, you just want to push the ball ahead before the defense can get set, too. But what that means is that we’re playing faster and the players are being pushed to further extremes. So you throw all this stuff into the hopper. Eighty-two games is too many—
So this isn’t about you wanting to put out of reach your record of seventy-three wins in a season—
I don’t think anybody’s ever beating that. [Laughs.] To get back to how we’re looking at things: I have great faith in Adam [Silver], and the league is filled with great people, but our problems are so exposed now and out in the open for everybody to comment on. I don’t envy Adam’s job.
There’s also tanking: teams unlikely to make the playoffs are doing all they can to lose in order to have the best chance to get a high draft pick.
Yeah. It’s been especially apparent this year because the draft is really good. It hasn’t been as noticeable in past years, but it’s definitely a thing.
I’ve heard various remedies proposed. Are you partial to any?
The solutions are you sort of make an even playing field. Flatten the odds. Or even penalizing teams for losing: If you’re in the worst three spots, you can’t get the first pick. But whatever we do—and it’s not really for me to sit here and say, “Here’s the solution,” because it’s way too complex for that—but whatever the league does, we just have to insure our fans that they’re going to get the best competition night in and night out. I’m watching some of these playoff games right now. They’re incredible. Incredible. We have such a great sport. We have such a great product. But we’ve got to do everything possible to make sure that the quality of the product throughout the regular season is at its peak. And I think we, like all businesses, are at risk of weakening the product and making it less popular.
You mentioned the strong draft class. Can you talk about the challenge of drafting well?
You can’t predict a guy’s personality. You can try. Our front office does these personality tests, we sit down and have lunch with them—but you don’t really know. You can’t. And you ask people, you ask their trainer, you ask their teammates, you do all kinds of background. But you always get to a point in the draft where you’re, like, “Should we take the safe guy who doesn’t have much of a ceiling or should we take this other guy despite the fact that he’s got some red flags?” Jerry West used to say, “If you’re right forty per cent of the time, you’re doing great.”
Is doping a threat to the N.B.A.’s product, too?
Well, there is testing. There have been guys even this year who have been suspended for multiple games for testing positive for some illegal substance. I literally have never seen a teammate or one of our players, never known anything. I think it probably happens in the N.B.A., but I think it’s exceedingly rare.
Henry Abbott, at the TrueHoop network, has reported how a number of N.B.A. owners had meaningful ties to Jeffrey Epstein and his financial network—specifically to Apollo Global Management, whose co-founder Leon Black paid Epstein at least a hundred and fifty-eight million dollars. Other Apollo co-founders include owners of the Philadelphia 76ers and the Atlanta Hawks, and Adam Silver’s college roommate is currently Apollo’s president. Do you think that fans should be troubled by this reporting?
This is modern life, right? It’s, like, you can dig into stuff and it might be meaningful and it might be way over the top. I mean, I think the same thing is true in business. I don’t think that every single person who had anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein should lose their job and have to sell their company. But if they had illegal dealings and illicit knowledge of what was happening and didn’t do anything about it, that’s a different story. But I wouldn’t know the first way how to differentiate that. I don’t follow that story very carefully. So what you’re telling me right now is actually news to me. I didn’t know there were any N.B.A. people who had ties.
There’s an owner whose name’s in there hundreds of times. Of course, as you say, there are also people whose names are in the files incidentally.
There has to be a distinction. But I also think that we’ve gotten so far away from what actually matters, and that’s the victims and what can we do to insure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen.
I ask because you’re generally quite well informed on things related to basketball.
I’m not well informed on this.
On a lighter note, I wrote a few years ago about the idea of adding a four-pointer to the game. Reggie Miller was opposed, but Kyle Korver and Larry Bird were open to it. Bird entered the league the same year the three-pointer was added, and he made the case that it’s always evolving.
I would never do a four-point play. In fact, I would even consider getting rid of the three-point line.
As the guy who holds the all-time record for three-point percentage? Come on.
I just think that the game, as it was designed, is really to create the best shots possible. That’s why in the early days, you just throw it inside to the big guy. A three-point line came from the A.B.A., in 1979, and I think it was really effective. It makes for an exciting play, but the analytics revolution has created a weird situation where we all know exactly where the highest efficiency shots are: layups and corner threes because the corner three is twenty-two feet and not 23.9, like the up above the break. You have this whole no man’s land between those areas. So if you shoot a twenty-two-footer now from the top of the key, that’s considered a really bad shot. I just wonder—and I don’t know if this would work or not—if we got rid of the three-point line, if it would diversify the way everybody would play and create a lot of different creative solutions to basketball.
Have you ever proposed this to anyone with power?
No, no, because it’s too out there. And plus, I coach Steph Curry, so I’d rather wait till Steph’s retired. I think there’s great coaches, and there’s a lot of creativity, but I wonder if the game would get more creative if we got rid of the three-point line.
But less of a role for Steve Kerr-type players.
Yeah, I wouldn’t make it in the N.B.A.
You have nine N.B.A. championships, from playing and coaching combined, behind Phil, Bill Russell, and Red Auerbach. Has your motivation for a tenth ring ebbed at all? Has the state of the world, your age, anything sort of changed your motivation toward the game?
No, that stuff is all incredible and very much the result of good fortune in my career. I mean, I played with Michael Jordan, so I got three rings. I played with Tim Duncan and David Robinson: I got two more. I was on their teams and I played a role, but then I also gained an incredible amount of experience and knowledge that I could bring to coaching. And then I get to coach Steph Curry and Draymond and Klay and Andre and all these guys. And Kevin Durant. And it’s, like, “Oh, my God, how the hell did all this happen?” So I’ve been incredibly blessed and lucky, but it’s not like I display those rings on my wall. I don’t even know where some of them are.
When I was staying with your mom, she said, at one point, “Let me see if I can find one of these rings Steve gave me.” And she couldn’t find it. But she wasn’t upset. She said, “Well, there’s more important things out there.” Is that your view?
Yes, but I also want to make sure I still have them. I believe four or five of them are in a safe-deposit box. And then I think three or four of them are in my drawers in my closet, honestly. But my point is I never look at them. I’m incredibly proud of them, but it’s not what drives me.
What drives you?
I wake up excited to come to the gym and coach basketball and collaborate with the staff and see the players and try to help them achieve something. That’s an amazing life. And that’s all that really matters is: Do you enjoy what you do every day and are you fulfilled? I still am. Winning is obviously much more fun than losing, but losing is part of it. And this year was our worst season we’ve ever had. No, I take that back: the COVID year, we had the worst record in the league. We lost everybody to injury and that was a rough season, but I don’t look at it like I’m a failure now, or I was wildly successful then, even though that’s how everyone measures things. I’m well aware that, like Pop and Phil taught us, this is life. This is all part of your existence as a coach, as a human being, and you’re going to experience everything. And you want to help people have that perspective and really embrace the things that are going to be there for them every day, which is the joy that comes from competing and the camaraderie that comes from being part of a team. And that stuff occurs even on losing teams. And it’s especially important on losing teams to make sure those things are happening.
You sound like a guy who wants to come back, and if it’s your choice, then you would.
This is a really interesting situation, and I’m very respectful of the organization and their place in the universe right now. And I know how this stuff works. Most coaching runs just last a certain amount of time, and then it’s best for everybody to move forward. And what we have to figure out is whether now is that time, because what complicates it is we still have Steph and Draymond.
For another year, right?
Yeah, another year each on their contracts. And I don’t want to abandon those guys. If Steph and Draymond were retiring this year, I think this would be an easy decision: we all go out together and the organization takes their new path. But it’s not that easy because I think Steph’s going to play another couple of years and I think we can still do some good things together. But these are all conversations that will happen in the next week or two and we’ll figure it out. And whatever happens, it’s going to end well. I know that, because it’s too important not to. ♦