RATHER THAN FACE THE THUNDER AND WEMBY, KERR COULD HAVE RUN FOR PRESIDENT
He is returning to Golden State for two years — to remain with Curry — when he could have retired with nine title rings and battled JD Vance instead of dealing with Oklahoma City and Victor Wembanyama
What if he ran for President? That would have been more sensible for Steve Kerr than trying to stun the Oklahoma City Thunder and Victor Wembanyama. He was wrong at the last Democratic National Convention, claiming, “After the results are tallied, we can — in the words of the great Steph Curry — we can tell Donald Trump: ‘Night, night.’ ’’
This time, against JD Vance or Ron DeSantis, Kerr may or may not have been right about sleep mode. At least he would have tried, which isn’t possible as he returns to the Golden State Warriors on a two-year contract. It would have been a fine moment to seek office or join ESPN in a star tenure as a commentator. He could have operated an NBA team, such as the Chicago Bulls, who hired another head-scratching soul as executive vice president of basketball operations. He could have helped the homeless in San Francisco.
Whatever Kerr wanted in life, he could have pursued the mission. Instead, he will coach Curry at 38 and 39. The only way this possibly works is if the front office acquires Giannis Antetokounmpo, who also is available to Boston and Miami and half the league. Otherwise, he’ll be stuck with an ailing Curry, a recuperating Jimmy Butler and a warped Draymond Green. Imagine the Warriors falling short of the play-in game with Kerr — owner of nine championship rings, four as a coach — standing aimlessly on the sideline.
Why?
Curry. He helped create the greatest all-time shooter and wants to help him in the final years. “I don’t want to walk away from Steph,” Kerr said after the Warriors were eliminated by Phoenix. “I’m definitely not going and coaching somewhere else next year in the NBA. I would never walk away from Steph, but all the stuff has to be aligned and right.”
It is aligned and right, apparently. Owner Joe Lacob might have been frazzled by Kerr’s frequent game-day shots at Trump, but he wants what the coach and everyone desires: long-term paperwork for Curry to finish in the Bay Area. Maybe he has wondered about his hometown, Charlotte, where the Hornets have been built as a possible contender. Why stay with the Warriors if he returned home and had a better chance? Well, Curry knows Kerr is family. Why leave if he’s giving it another try? “Steph and I basically share the same values in life,” Kerr told The Athletic. “And so I feel like a lot of our culture has come from Steph and my shared life values. And it was pure luck. … I could see it from afar. I thought, well, Steph is Tim Duncan. He’s the real deal. Whoever coaches him is gonna be so lucky because he’ll be in collaboration with the coach and once I got here and I saw the joy that he took out of the game itself and life itself, (I thought), ‘Hell yeah! This is my guy. We’re the same guy.’ ’’
Also, he loves the coaching game. The money — he’ll remain atop the profession, above $17.5 mllion a year — isn’t nearly as fun as the day-to-day grind. “I enjoyed it, believe it or not,” Kerr said. “I love coaching, and I love being with all the staff and the players, and I love being in the fight. I love having a quest and the daily ritual of trying to figure something out. It’s really beautiful. It’s really fun to be part of that. So, despite the injuries, despite the adversity, despite the struggles, I still enjoyed it. I enjoyed every day, but things didn’t go our way, obviously, and that’s part of it, too.”
But — he must win. Or everyone will be miserable, including Curry. “We have to get back to the basics of what makes a good basketball team, a competitive basketball team every single night, realize how hard it is to win in this league,” Curry said last month. “Can we rethink how we do things with the foundation that we’ve established? We don’t have to keep saying ‘championship, championship, championship’ every day, even though we’ve experienced that. Can we build the foundation again?”
One answer is dumping Green. The sports world agreed last week that we’re throughly sick of this child. On “Inside the NBA,” Charles Barkley informed Green that the Warriors no longer are real. “Sports are for young people. You hope to have a great, long career, but nobody wins when they’re 37, 38,” Barkley said.
LeBron James, who must make a retirement decision soon, agrees with Barkley. He was asked how the Thunder, who have started the playoffs 7-0 and lead the Lakers 3-0: “They’re pretty damn good from top to bottom. They don’t let their foot off the gas.”
Said Lakers coach JJ Redick: “They’ve kicked our ass three-straight games. They’re an incredible basketball team. … Just the nature of how they built that team.”
Then there’s Wembanyama, who joined Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain as the only playoff performers with at least 39 points, 15 rebounds and five blocks in a game. Unlike the others, he shot better than 70 percent from the field. He speaks of an imminent championship in San Antonio. “We got what it takes. We got the talent. We got the depth,” he said. “We don’t got the experience, but we don’t care. We need to apply. We can go to the top, the very top, if we play consistently.”
He thinks he can be the Greatest Player of All Time. “It’s the feeling I get before games, I dunno, this excitement, this heat in my heart,” he said. “It just gets stronger and stronger as the game goes on. I’m built for this. I love this more than anything else.”
So, why would Draymond reply to Barkley with one of the dumber comments ever on sports TV: ”I think the goal is just to not look like you in the Houston Rockets uniform.”
Green isn’t remotely in Barkley’s category as a basketball player. He isn’t remotely in Barkley’s category as an analyst. Shame on him for knocking Chuck and taking a shot at Kerr, who realized Green was a defensive gem and should be disregarded offensively. “As much as he’s done for me in basketball, a part of me thinks he’s hindered me in my career and what I could have become,” Green said.
He’s deranged. Austin Rivers, son of Doc, shot back. “You were the luckiest basketball player, I think I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You were drafted to a franchise with a Hall of Fame front office, Hall of Fame coach, the greatest shooter of all time and perhaps a top-five player of all time. Not to mention one of the most lethal scorers of all time and arguably a top-10 player of all time, Kevin Durant — the same guy you chased off because you talk too much. Steve Kerr made your career. How dare you?”
Barkley only needed four words in response.
“I never punch down,” he said.
Steve Kerr, much as he adores Green, cannot deal with the familiar crap. Trade him, waive him, drown him and enjoy the best of twilight with Steph Curry. That way, I get it.
Otherwise, he should have stared down JD Vance.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.