Steve Kerr won five championship rings during his playing career and has led the Golden State Warriors to four NBA titles in eight seasons
Friday 17 June 2022 14:13, UK
He hit a championship-winning shot with Michael Jordan, he calls the shots for Stephen Curry and he's just won a ninth NBA championship.
From clutch to coach, Steve Kerr has done it all for some of basketball's biggest winners. Any team that can claim to be a dynasty across the last 30 years of the NBA has some link to Golden State's mastermind.
Now back in Boston, the winning Warrior is celebrating a ninth NBA championship. Once, to win that much you had to be a Celtic. Instead, Kerr is the one who has been lifting the Larry O'Brien trophy on their floor.
And this was the most remarkable success of them all. After making five successive NBA Finals as Warriors coach, the defeat to the Toronto Raptors in 2019 had a profound effect on the franchise.
Klay Thompson (ACL) and Kevin Durant (Achilles tendon) both badly injured themselves in that series, with Thompson ending up sidelined for two-and-a-half years, while Durant subsequently left for the Brooklyn Nets.
The Warriors then had the worst record in the NBA two seasons ago before getting beaten in the Play-In game last season. Now though, they are champions once again – and Kerr is once more the man behind the success. Although, typically, he was keen to deflect any praise headed his way.
As ever, he passed the credit when he was interviewed on the winners' podium - this time to Curry, and just as he did as a player with Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Tim Duncan and David Robinson, when trying to explain his success.
"Just hanging around the right people," he said with a smile. "You hang around superstars long enough, you're going to get some residual success falling your way."
There's more to it than that, of course. Talent may take a team to the top, but staying there – and then getting back again after being knocked down – demands more than that. It requires understanding the personnel on the court and the personalities in the locker room.
It means thinking the game as well as playing it, and Kerr does that with the best of them.
"The man's knowledge for the game is second to none," Thompson said.
Kerr hasn't won quite like Bill Russell, the Celtics Hall of Fame center who pocketed 11 rings as a player. Nor as much as Phil Jackson, who won 11 of his own as a coach.
Yet, when it comes to combining winning as a player and a coach, few have done it better than Kerr.
He won five titles in uniform with Chicago and San Antonio. Add in the fourth he's just picked up as Golden State's boss on the bench, and he is the first person in NBA history to win at least four championships as a player and a coach. He was also the only person of whom that was true when the number stood at three.
Throw in a couple stints as an analyst for TNT around his time as general manager of the Phoenix Suns, and Kerr has seen NBA basketball from almost every angle.
"I mean, Steve has had such an incredible, unique career, from player to coach, GM. He just knows how to gel talent together," Thompson said. "Then he draws from his playing days, which is really cool to hear and talk about, playing with Mike and Scottie, the Twin Towers in San Antonio."
Kerr wasn't a player like those Hall of Fame talents. A second-round pick in the 1988 draft, he started only 30 games in his career. He never averaged double figures in any of his 15 seasons, sticking around that long by being a good team-mate and a better shooter.
Most players aren't superstars, and because he wasn't, Kerr makes it a point of reaching out to players like himself.
Celtics guard Derrick White remembers Kerr helping to make him comfortable when he was promoted to the US roster for the 2019 Basketball World Cup after originally only being a player on the team practising against the Americans.
"Any time I needed a question or anything during that whole USA experience, he was there for me," White said.
Kerr said: "I definitely identify with role players more than I can identify with a star player, just because I have the experience of coming off the bench and trying to figure out a role and all that stuff."
Being a role player doesn't mean Kerr didn't have a big part to play.
Curry may be considered the greatest outside shooter ever, but it's Kerr whose 45.4 per cent career mark from 3-point range is top in NBA history. He knocked down the jumper to secure the Bulls' 1997 championship, joking during the victory celebration in Chicago that he stepped up to take the shot because Jordan didn't feel comfortable doing so.
The confidence Kerr showed on the floor then is the same he demonstrates in the huddle now, a resolve that Draymond Green says makes the Warriors feel "invincible."
"There are times where we get a little rattled as a team and he's just right there, steady force, like 'Hey, man, just calm down, settle down,'" Green said.
And this is the same guy who once got in a fistfight with Jordan at practice!
These Warriors needed that steadiness more than ever during their run of three titles in four years from 2015-18. With Thompson still recovering from injuries well into the season and then Curry and Green going down after he returned, Golden State were hardly at full strength before the playoffs and certainly not the powerhouse of recent years.
"We've had to figure some things out on the fly," their coach said.
Teams with Kerr usually do. That is why he is celebrating ring number nine.
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