Steve Kerr Gets Real About the Warriors
Golden State’s longtime coach discusses Jimmy Butler’s timetable, fans’ criticism of the front office, realistic expectations for the Warriors’ season, and moreSteve Kerr Gets Real About the Warriors
Golden State’s longtime coach discusses Jimmy Butler’s timetable, fans’ criticism of the front office, realistic expectations for the Warriors’ season, and more
Steve Kerr had a hell of a summer.
It began with deep contemplation, as the Golden State Warriors’ 61-year-old coach weighed retirement after 13 seasons. Then came clarity, when he signed a two-year extension in May to lead the Warriors into an uncertain future. Then came action, as team brass took their biggest swing since signing Kevin Durant in 2016 with the pursuit of LeBron James in free agency.
Ultimately, James declined the Warriors’ overtures, opting to sign more than 3,000 miles away in Philadelphia, which offered the chance to contend at a level Golden State could not match. Meanwhile, the Warriors drafted Yaxel Lendeborg and re-signed Al Horford, D’Anthony Melton, and Kristaps Porzingis, who has yet to practice or play with the team because of an illness. They inked a pair of extensions in the backcourt: Stephen Curry for two years and $116 million, and Brandin Podziemski for five years and $110 million.
Golden State will return most of last year’s roster, though injury has taken a bite out of its rotation: In addition to Porzingis’s indefinite absence, the team will be without Moses Moody and Jimmy Butler for the first months of the season. At the tail end of a generational run with Curry, the tenor of the new season is more somber than the Warriors are used to.
The preseason has offered sprinkles of optimism and clouds of dread. Lendeborg seems like a seamless fit in Kerr’s offensive scheme and will open the season as a starter. A scary Curry ankle sprain ended up being minor, but nonetheless underscored this roster’s dependence on the 38-year-old superstar.
About a week before the Warriors' season opener against the Lakers, I sat down with Kerr to talk about his expectations for the coming season, the Warriors’ pursuit of LeBron and other stars to pair with Curry, and how he plans to get through the final years of coaching in one piece. Our interview, transcribed below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What excites you about this upcoming season? What scares you?
What scares me is just injuries, and age. So much of winning and success comes from health, and we have several key guys who are on the older side and they're vulnerable. I'm talking about Steph, Jimmy, Draymond [Green], Al, Kristaps. So that scares me. Scares every coach. Every year, if you want to win a title, you have to have health.
What excites me is the change in our teaching and our philosophy. We're not really changing our style of play—we're always going to be a ball-movement team. But I like that we're instituting some new concepts in the way we are teaching. Our practices are different. If you talk to our players, our older players, they'll tell you there's a different format to our teaching. So I think like any teacher, you don't want to just keep running back the same thing over and over again. You have to find new ways to message, new ways to teach. And I'm really excited by our new process that we have.
What are the new goals that are maybe different from other seasons?
The goals are 100 percent process right now. There's no mention of home-court advantage, top six—we're not even talking about any of that. The goals are to reimagine ourselves offensively, really focus on the details, on the margins, understanding that we're shorthanded right from the beginning without Jimmy, without Moses, without Kristaps. So it allows us as coaches to really have the freedom to zero in, hone in on a lot of weak spots for us.
What I've told the team is: We get better in the margins, we build momentum, we build our identity, and then we get some guys back. Jimmy is one of the great winners I've ever been around. And so our team knows we're going to get him back sometime later in the season, hopefully sometime in February. It could be the exact opposite of last year. Last season we lost him in February; this year we get him back in February. So let's lay the groundwork. Let's build our identity. Let's work on all of our weak spots, get some momentum going, and get to full strength. Let's see what we can do.
I want to talk about the offseason. It felt like this was the summer of LeBron. Where did that go wrong?
It never went wrong. We were never really that close. Steph and Dray obviously are friends with him, so they were doing the recruiting. I know LeBron now pretty well from the Olympics, and so I reached out to him during free agency and he's always really good about responding to texts. He's one of the guys who you text, you get a response. I just said, “Hey, if we have something to chat about, let me know.” And I never heard back. And I wasn't offended at all.
Our fan base might have been thrilled if we had traded five firsts and two of our better players for one of the big fish. They might have been happy for a year and they might have been miserable for the next decade if it backfired.
So while all this chatter was going on, like “LeBron's going to Golden State,” I'm like, “No, he's not.” We've worked together, we have great respect for each other. If he was interested, he would not just be talking to Steph and Dray, but he'd reach out and we'd have discussions.
In the end, I think he made the right decision. It's a team that he gets to go to as the new guy, but also a team that hasn't won a title in 40-plus years. And can you imagine seeing him in a Warriors uniform? It would have been so weird.
I'll be honest with you. I never thought he was coming.
Yeah, I didn't either.
So you never allowed yourself to think he would?
No.
Not only this offseason, but in previous seasons when there was chatter around the trade deadline, did you ever think to yourself like, “OK, if Steph and LeBron are on the same team, I'm going to do X, Y, Z”?
Oh, trust me, I was hoping it was going to happen. It would have been fun as hell. I would have loved for it to happen, but it was never close in my mind. So I never even went there and I never was thinking about strategy, none of that. It was pretty clear to me early on that we weren't really in the mix.
Do you feel like the front office has done enough for Steph over the last two years?
There's never been any question about the Warriors’ commitment to winning and that's displayed by our tax bill year after year. Joe [Lacob] wants to win more than any owner I've ever been around and he will do anything to win. And so I think over the last five years we've made mistakes, myself included. I've made my share of mistakes as a coach. We've made our share of mistakes organizationally, but there's never been a lack of commitment to Steph.
Some Warriors fans would say, and I'm sure you've heard this, that you guys should say "F those picks.” That there would be an organizational ethos of, We're going to do every single thing possible.
And that's why I'm saying we've made mistakes. Me, organization, front office, we haven't been perfect. Nobody is perfect. Every organization at the end of the year, you just look and you go, “Man, we should have done this differently. We should have done that differently.” And I don't blame our fans at all for saying that, because Steph is Steph. He's the greatest face of a franchise, pillar of an organization who's ever lived. And fans are frustrated because we haven't been able to make that move that you're talking about.
But what I would argue in return is that move has not been available. And I'm not going to go into details because it's not my job, it's not right, but Mike [Dunleavy Jr.] fills me in. Should we have done X, Y, or Z? Sure. But were X, Y, and Z available? In some cases, maybe yes. In some cases, maybe no. But making a deal in the NBA is really hard. And I can tell you, we went after a lot of those big fish and we didn't get them. And what I would also say to our fan base is, OK, I get it. You would've liked to have seen one of those big fish here, but now we're heading into the next era where we've got all this cap room and all our picks. There's going to be teams that have done this trade-everybody thing, traded all their picks for a couple stars, that are going to be stuck for a decade.
I know I'm talking to Steve Kerr, the coach. I want to talk to Bulls guard Steve Kerr in 1997. Would that Steve Kerr accept it if Jerry Krause and the Bulls front office were like, “OK, Jordan's here, but we're going to plan for the future”?
Very different.
How so?
The age of guys was different. First of all, ’98, that team was done. That doesn't mean you send Michael Jordan packing, but that team as it was constituted was done. So it's revisionist history to say Jerry Krause should have kept that team together and we would've won another three titles. That team was done. We were emotionally exhausted, spent, physically spent. So in hindsight, knowing the league, knowing what I knew about that team, now having the view from above, from having a grasp for coaching and front-office stuff, you keep Michael Jordan and you keep some of the guys, but you go out and you change the roster around him however you can.
I'm not saying you would keep the roster intact, but more that the front office would do everything it can to make sure Michael is in contention.
Look, I would argue we have tried to do that here with Steph, with our roster. It's really hard. And we have made several monster offers to teams for some of the big fish and we didn't get those guys. And then you better draw the line somewhere. Our fan base might have been thrilled if we had traded five firsts and two of our better players for one of the big fish. They might have been happy for a year and they might have been miserable for the next decade if it backfired.
You have to look at where everybody is right now—our whole roster and also the rest of the league. Do you really want to trade your entire future right now when you're looking at San Antonio and OKC and what they've built? That's Mike's job. The front office's job is to see the big picture. The fan's job is to see the next game. The coach's job is to see the next game. Somebody has to look out long term. And so we have tried to thread that needle. We've tried to do everything we could.
This fan base hasn't seen anything like Steph before. I think there’s a fear that once he's gone, you won’t be able to find a player to replicate this.
OK, so you're talking about the fan base. Tell me the move we should have made.
I don't know.
Yeah, neither do I. That's the point.
I will follow up with this. We got Jimmy Butler. We did make that move. And when we made that move for that span, from the time Jimmy got here to the time Jimmy got injured, we had the fifth-best record in the NBA. And by the way, we were deep in the tax. And so that was our big fish move. And we were lucky to get Jimmy without having to pay a king's ransom.
When we made that move, we felt great. We go and beat Houston in the first round [of the 2025 playoffs]. We beat Minnesota in Game 1, and then Steph pulls his hamstring. So now we have to look at this rationally. Do we throw away our entire future to build around a 39-year-old Steph? He turns 39 in March, right? Does it make sense now to throw away all those picks? Hell no.
Steph might think so, I don’t know.
It makes no sense.
I want you to take the coach hat off and put the player hat on. Do some part of you feel like, man, maybe Steph should just at least nudge us a little bit?
One of his superpowers is he lets people do their jobs. So it's easy to say, why doesn’t Steph push the front office to trade—
Like every other star of his era.
Well, that's not who he is. That's part of what makes him the human being that he is. That's a great thing, right? Now, again, are there things maybe we could have done better over the last few years? Sure. But Steph knows that's not his job. And he knows there are repercussions to that if he makes it his job.
There's no mention of home-court advantage, top six—we're not even talking about any of that. The goals are to reimagine ourselves offensively, really focus on the details.
In my experience, players make terrible talent evaluators. Players make terrible GMs. Steph knows his role. He knows who he is. He trusted Bob Myers. He trusts Mike. This is a hard thing. It's not like there's just one right answer. This is art, this is not science.
Steph is such an incredible human being, and he trusts people to do their jobs. He communicates behind the scenes. He doesn't go on Twitter calling out Mike or me, but you know what he does? He comes and talks to us. He says, "Hey, what about this? Why aren't we doing that?" And guess what? All those things are private. I know this is a really old-fashioned concept, but it's actually healthy. So I think if our fans want Steph to be the dysfunctional player who's writing cryptic tweets about his GM and his coach, they should thank their lucky stars that he's not.
I want to take you back to Cleveland, Ohio, in 2018. You guys have just won back-to-back titles. What do you think your utopian vision would have been for how this dynasty should have ended?
Well, first of all, I knew that there was no such thing, and I knew that because of ’98, right? Everybody on earth, all the sports fans, all the talking heads, their vision is that the championship is won and the superstar rides off into the sunset. So I don't know … maybe John Elway did that? Maybe.
Jordan did it, I guess. He had a chance to.
Yeah, but everybody says that ended wrong for the Bulls. There is no such thing. It can't end in this perfect way because there's always a next season.
What do you wish had happened?
I don't wish anything different happened.
In 2024, it was, “OK, let's keep the whole band together”—at least Klay, Steph, and Draymond, and ride off into the sunset. How does it make you feel that that didn’t happen?
I mean, it would've been great if Klay could have retired as a Warrior as well.
I'd also add Kevin [Durant] to that, too.
They're all going to have a statue outside this building. They are, and they all deserve it. And so yeah, if you want to use your imagination and create this utopian vision, all four guys stay until the very end and they all retire together and we have a really nice party and everybody gives a nice speech. Good luck with that.
It's not how sports work, though.
It's not how life works, either.
I want to talk about Jimmy real quick. How’s his recovery process going? When do you hope to get him back?
He's doing great. I just talked to him this morning. He was in our weight room. He looks good. He feels good. We live near each other in San Diego in the offseason, so we saw each other down there. Jimmy is one of the most interesting guys—straightforward, confident, very convicted in his beliefs on the game, on how things should go, how things should be done organizationally. He has the strongest emotional hold over a game of any guy I've been around since Jordan. It's a hard thing to explain, but Jimmy is the alpha on the court and I don't care who's out there.
What's the most quintessential Jimmy story that you’re willing to share?
A good example would be on the second day of training camp, he's on the sidelines watching the end of practice. I put everybody on the line, bring somebody out to make two free throws, and if they make two, the team doesn't have to run. If they miss two, the team's got to run, then I bring another guy. Somebody's got to make two straight free throws and then practice is over.
So in Hawaii, I called somebody out, they missed, and the team ran. I asked one of our rookies, Graham [Ike] I said, "Graham, you get to pick anybody you want." He goes, "Jimmy." Jimmy walks out there, he knocks down two free throws—and we all knew he would.
He just has this aura about him, and it's a very unique trait. Michael Jordan had it, Kobe had it. I'm not just talking about physical dominance or skill dominance or how many points you score. I'm talking about an emotional hold on a game where everybody in the gym knows you're the man. I think that's Jimmy's superpower. He complements Steph so perfectly because Steph obviously controls the game with his skill. He holds sway over the arena with his skill, but Jimmy does it with his force and his mentality. Draymond does it with passion and energy, but he loses his emotion sometimes. Jimmy's always under control, a little bit like Kobe, a little bit like Michael. I've never seen Jimmy yell at an official. I've never seen him lose his poise. There's just something different about guys like that. I have so much belief in Jimmy when he's healthy and his ability to take us over the top because he's made his whole career out of doing that, taking teams deeper than anybody thought they could go.
What is the latest evolution of you and Draymond’s relationship?
If Tom Izzo's like a father figure for him, I'm like an uncle. I'm family. I could never replace Tom Izzo because of what Tom did for Draymond at a time in Draymond’s life when he was just figuring out who he was as a player, as a human being. Coach Izzo changed Draymond's life forever. He prepared him for manhood, for the NBA, for what his role needed to be, for how to channel his gift to winning. Coach Izzo prepared all that; I inherited it. And so the relationship Dray and I have had over the last 12 years, we've been collaborators. We've collaborated on winning and making sure this thing's still going.
Obviously I've had to learn from the very beginning how to coach him and the team in those moments where his emotion gets the best of him. Our relationship will always have some emotion attached and I'm going to be mad at him, he's going to be mad at me. But in the end, at this point we're family and we will be family forever.
[Jimmy Butler] has the strongest emotional hold over a game of any guy I've been around since Jordan.
I remember watching at home last year when Draymond walked off the court during a timeout and didn’t return to the game. And then you were the one who seemed to be apologizing for it afterward. That was weird to see.
I learned a lot from Phil Jackson. And Draymond and Dennis Rodman are not the same guy, I want to make that clear. But I watched Phil get the best out of Dennis Rodman. Dennis was a complicated person, different from Dray, but in both instances, Phil had to ask himself the same thing I have to ask myself. How badly do I want to win? I want to win. And so if I want to win, I have to make it work with one of the players in the league who impacts winning in the first percentile. That's Draymond Green. And so do you have to compromise some of your principles at times? Yes. So you have a choice. You can either be old-school, “my way or the highway,” in which case one of you is going to be gone in a year.
Or you can figure out how to be flexible and how to make sure the rest of your team understands, "Hey, I'm going to give this guy some rope, but we still have some standards and some values around here and this is what it should look like, but it's going to spill over the top sometimes."
It feels like one of the stories of Golden State’s run is that Draymond will be Draymond—and that could be for better or worse.
I've said it before, I'll say it for the rest of my life: Without Draymond, we have zero championships. And that is not taking anything away from Steph or Kevin Durant or Klay Thompson. It's not. But this guy drives winning at such a degree that I want him on my team. And yes, I've made mistakes, but I've tried to make it work and I love him like a family member and I see the goodness in him. And he's a complex guy and he knows he's a complex guy. So we've figured it out, but yes, we're going to have some family squabbles occasionally.
Do you study the endings of legendary coaches and is there an ending you'd like to replicate?
Not really. And honestly, I haven't really studied the ending.
I would say this, and I think I said this last year to Wright Thompson when we were spending some time together: I don't want to go too late and I don't want to go too early.
And you felt like last year was too early?
I didn't know. I didn't know until I took those two, three weeks if it was too early. And then after talking to my wife, talking to Mike and Joe and Kirk [Lacob] and really examining what it would look like going forward, I came to the conclusion that, no, it was too early. I still have something to offer. And I think the team, they have shown that they still want me here and we still make a really good group. I'm talking about management, players, and coaches. And I'm so excited about this team, this season, our training camp. So I know without a doubt, it's too soon, but I don't want to be too late.
So you'll finish this contract, right?
I signed for two years and I can't see myself walking away after this year, but it feels now like there's some shape to this thing. There's some clarity. I could see this ending where Steph, Dray, we all leave around the same time. I could see that happening.
You also told me that two, three years ago.
I did. I did. And I'm well aware that the NBA's crazy. Anything could happen.
What advice would current Steve Kerr give 2014 Steve Kerr after meeting with Phil Jackson to discuss the Knicks job?
When I was going through that process, there were two people who really impacted that decision behind the scenes. One was Rick Carlisle, and the other was Danny Ferry. I think Danny was GM of the Hawks at the time. When I was going through it, I called him and I said, “What do you think?” He said, “What do you think Phil Jackson would do if he was in your shoes?”
And I was like, “Oh, he'd go where the talent was.” Phil was smart. The job he took was the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan. Phil would have gone to coach Steph Curry.
And then Rick was the head of the Coaches Association. He called me out of the blue—and we were friends, but not super close. He just said, "Hey, I've been in the business for a while. Could I offer some unsolicited advice?" And I said, "Yeah." And he goes, "When we played the Warriors last year, I would look across the court and I would think, ‘Man, I don't know how we're going to beat these guys. They're loaded. Holy shit.’"
And so I think both guys pushed me in that direction, in the direction my heart already was. I'm from California. My daughter was at Cal-Berkeley playing on the volleyball team. I tried to trade for Steph Curry when I was GM of the Suns. My heart was telling me all along, go coach the Warriors. But Phil Jackson [who was president of the Knicks at the time] meant that much to me that I was considering going to the Knicks and obviously made the right choice.
Was it dope to see the Knicks win a title this year?
It was great.
To see them win with a small guard like Jalen Brunson?
I didn't care about that. None of that stuff matters to me. What matters to me is Mike Brown. As an NBA fan, the Knicks winning was awesome—their fan base, the first title in 50-plus years, to see the reaction of the city, to see the Garden. And I felt bad for my Spurs friends. That was a tough series to choose who I wanted to win because of Mike Brown on one side and then Pop and RC [Buford] on the other. But as a basketball fan, it was really awesome to see the New York Knicks win a title.
Back to your expectations for this season. I've been around you guys for a minute and it's weird to hear you guys say if this works, if this works, if this works. There's not as much certainty right now. You are one of the most competitive people I know. This preseason, cameras caught you having a little sideline blowup. How are you adjusting to this?
I love coaching. I love the process and I'm really enjoying this new process that we're going through. And some of that is circumstantial—like you're talking about the uncertainty, I'm actually enjoying it. It's a challenge. How are we going to get through this?
And you're not just saying that?
No, I'm not just saying it. It's part of coaching, but I think there is a little bit of a shift in the vibe around here because other than the COVID year when we had all the injuries, we've always made no mistake that our goal is just to win the whole thing. So in 12 years, 11 of those, it was like we started the year with our goal being to win the championship. And really since that first year when we did win it, we had a formula and we've had different personnel, but generally speaking, a similar formula for how to get there. We've had to rethink all of that because we went 37-45 last year and the league has changed. You got so much young talent out there. And so part of our circumstances that we have to recognize is that we're in a different spot now. And there's a little bit of freedom that comes with that. Freedom to innovate, freedom to explore, experiment.
What do you want the Warriors to look like when you're gone?
I want them to flourish when I'm gone. I want this place to be special, to maintain the status we've achieved as a marquee franchise in the league. And that's pretty hard to do. And I give Steph the most credit for that, but ownership is so important in sports. When Joe Lacob bought this team, the Warriors were an afterthought. What he did with the business and the branding of the team and the economic model as well as being brash—like, “we're going to win a championship” and then following through on that—this is now, in my mind, one of the marquee franchises in the NBA and I want it to remain so.
And Joe Lacob gives you faith it's going to happen?
Joe Lacob gives me faith it's going to happen because you see what's happened with the Valkyries. To me, the Valkyries are one of the greatest expansion stories in sports history to see how quickly they have captured the Bay Area. The same thing happened with the Warriors. There was already a fan base, but this is Joe's passion. This is his commitment. I have faith. And Mike is really, really good at his job. And next year the books are clear, picks are there. We've got some young players. We're in a spot now that I think is much improved from a couple of years ago.
