Steve Kerr Hasn’t Had Enough Just Yet

It should not have taken a month and change for the Golden State Warriors to figure out what they wanted to do with head coach Steve Kerr, nor should it have taken that long for Kerr to figure out what to do with them. If management wanted to punish their Hall of Fame-bound head coach for allegedly mismanaging Jonathan Kuminga (we'll wait for you in the back to settle down), they should have canned him the day after their play-in loss to Phoenix. If Kerr was fed up with his bosses sniping about how he could not somehow draw up a scheme that negated the ravages of advanced age and bad health, or find a fix for a roster with more questions than answers, he should have dropped his pants on his way out of the season recap meeting and hit the road for either a lifetime of golf or an NBA job without the comforts of Stephen Curry. Kerr, we needn't add here, is not insane. So no, neither of those events occurred. In the end, logic, common sense, and good old inertia won out, and the 32 days didn't matter in the end. Reports claimed this process took three actual weeks, but that doesn't include the week and half after the season ended when nothing moved except for the rumor mill. Nevertheless, whatever handwringing and agonized forehead rubs were expended by all parties en route, the result was as it should have been. A few meetings, a little golf, and voila! The status is quo. The center holds; the man who coached the Golden State Warriors last year will coach them in the next. And yet this is still a story of at least minimal consequence, if only because it never got the automatic resolution it deserved. Kerr and Curry are a matched pair, and each helped the other build the last great NBA dynasty; you may quarrel amongst yourselves about the who-did-what ratio, but there's no arguing the broader point. And, as each man was both comfortable and competitive, it seemed appropriate that neither would consider leaving without the other. Curry isn't leaving, and now Kerr isn't, either; this makes sense. But those 32 days didn't feel nearly that inevitable, and a vacuum demands to be filled, and so we got the fevered specu-guessing that we got.