SAN FRANCISCO — The Warriors weren’t supposed to be here, back in the NBA Finals, especially under these circumstances.
Injuries kept their top three players — Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green — from being on the floor together for all but 11 minutes of the 82-game regular season. James Wiseman, the team’s most talented big man, never suited up for a game because of complications from knee surgery. Curry is 34 years old, Thompson and Green are 32.
Still, the Warriors went 53-29 this season, the third-best record in the league. And now they’re playing for the championship for the sixth time in eight seasons.
Did that make Kerr coach of the year? Nope. He wasn’t even a finalist when the vote was announced May 9. Monty Williams of the Phoenix Suns was the winner. Taylor Jenkins of the Memphis Grizzlies and Eric Spoelstra of the Miami Heat were the runners-up.
“Monty Williams was 100 percent deserving of the award this year,” Kerr said last week. “To win 64 games — and I can go down the list. It’s a really difficult award to pick. But whether you talk about Jason Kidd or Taylor Jenkins or Erik Spoelstra, Ime Udoka, there’s so many coaches who did a great job this year. So I didn’t feel slighted at all. The award went to the right guy.”
Kerr is hunting bigger game anyway. The Larry O’Brien Trophy, awarded to the NBA Finals champion, would be the Warriors’ fourth since Kerr became coach in 2014.
“When the season started, I felt like this was a possibility,” Kerr said. “But the difference is five years ago, it felt like a probability that we would get this far and even go on and win a championship.
“So with the mystery that surrounded this team from the beginning, it’s been very gratifying to see the players have success, very gratifying to see them get through the down period — a lot of chatter, a lot of stress. Our guys were able to navigate their way through it.”
ESPN had the Warriors finishing in the middle of the pack this season. FiveThirtyEight projected them to win 37 games.
There was logic behind those grim outlooks.
Thompson, still rehabbing from two devastating leg injuries, was not expected to be back before Christmas, if then, and there was no way of knowing whether he would be the same player he had been before missing two seasons. Wiseman was coming off a knee injury that had put an early end to his up-and-down rookie season.
The Warriors were coming off two seasons in which they had missed the playoffs.
“It felt like we had a lot to prove,” Kerr said.
Kerr has been blessed with immense talent since he left TV to coach a Golden State team coming off a 51-win season under Mark Jackson. Perhaps the curse of having a star-laden roster is not being recognized as a premier coach.
“Voters and coaches, at times, look at the talent level that’s on particular teams, and they’re like, ‘Well, it’s because of the talent,’ and they forget about a lot of the hard work that the coach and the coaching staff and management, what they go through,” Hall of Famer Reggie Miller said. “I applaud Steve because he understands the landscape of his team and understands how to manage that throughout the course of a long season.”
Kerr’s ability to manage superstars — from Kevin Durant to Curry, Thompson and Green — and adapt to changing rosters and shifting ideologies stands out to Charles Barkley. He likened Kerr to Hall of Fame coach Chuck Daly, who expertly juggled the explosive personalities of the “Bad Boys” Detroit Pistons and won back-to-back NBA titles in 1989 and 1990.
“He takes his ego out of play because when you’re coaching great players, they all have a tremendous ego and you can butt heads at times,” Barkley said. “Chuck Daly was one of the best in terms of dealing with Isiah (Thomas), Dennis Rodman, guys like that. Steve reminds me of that type of coach.”
The Coach of the Year award, established during the 1962-63 season and later named after legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach, is voted on by 100 media members worldwide. Only 10 coaches have won the award more than once, led by Gregg Popovich, Pat Riley and Don Nelson with three apiece.
Kerr won in 2016 after the Warriors, coming off their first championship in 40 years, produced the greatest season in NBA history. They went 73-9, breaking the record of 72 victories set by the Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls in 1995-96.
Kerr hasn’t been named coach of the year since then, despite taking the Warriors to the Finals four more times.
How did Kerr not rate even as a finalist this season?
“Everybody thought just because, I guess, he’s had many teams in the past with so much talent and all that that it’s an easy job,” Curry said. “It wasn’t easy then, it wasn’t easy now.”
Winning the award in 2016 was “really nice” and “a wonderful honor,” Kerr said. But he seems completely and sincerely at peace with the 2022 vote.
“I think Steve would honestly say that’s not the goal,” Warriors general manager Bob Myers said.
“Every year he gets better as a coach. How he navigated this year is great and we’re still going.”
Is he still undervalued by the masses?
“For sure,” Curry said. But to “people that know basketball, he’s not.”
