Steve Kerr said in mid-April that he thought it was over. Speaking at the Beverly Wilshire, the Golden State Warriors coach said he had decided to retire when the season ended, putting the odds of leaving at 95 percent and describing his 12-year run with the team as something that would end with the final game.
That was the clearest public sign yet that Kerr sees this season as the finish line for one of the NBA’s longest modern coaching tenures. He had already spent the night before the Warriors’ first postseason play-in game in Los Angeles driving from Beverly Hills to Draymond Green’s house for a team dinner, where the menu included smoked brisket, lamb chops, pork shoulder and burnt ends.
Kerr’s comments carried the weight of a coach who has spent more than a decade inside the same pressure cooker, and who has watched the Warriors’ best years from the bench. He also offered one of the lines that has followed him for years, saying that when Klay Thompson scored 37 points in a quarter, it felt like the Warriors were in the presence of God. Kerr added that he thinks there is some mysterious spiritual thing behind players reaching a flow state.
The possibility of retirement also sends Kerr back through a life that has always moved between places and upheaval. He grew up bouncing between Pacific Palisades and Cairo as his family followed his father’s career, and in 1982 Malcolm Kerr became president of the American University of Beirut. Less than two years later, on January 18, 1984, an Iranian-sponsored gunman from Hezbollah shot Malcolm Kerr. Last year, Steve Kerr’s childhood home burned in the Palisades Fire.
There was a different kind of hard edge to his own basketball story. Kerr chose Arizona after coming out of high school, but he said he was barely playing there and averaging just under six points a game. Asked later for a shorthand way to explain the lives behind the names, he replied: “Johnny Bench Joe Montana.” It was the kind of clipped reference that fit someone describing talent, fame and distance without trying to dress it up.
If this is the end, it would close a 12-year run that helped define a franchise and a coach. Kerr has not hidden the fact that he was thinking about the finish line in mid-April, and the question now is not whether he planted the idea himself, but whether the season will be the last time he walks off an NBA sideline wearing Warriors colors.
