Steve Kerr has always been associated more with Phil Jackson, his coach during three championships with the Bulls, than Gregg Popovich, his coach during his two title runs with the Spurs, but Kerr is more Popovich in personality, if only because no one can ever match Jackson for stoking opponents and opposing cities or even for cultivating tension within his own teams. Kerr is much closer to Pop in personality and he knows it.
But what a Zen moment Saturday.
The Warriors have been put on their heels by back-to-back double-digit losses to the Cavaliers. LeBron James is asserting himself in the scariest of ways against Golden State. Andrew Bogut is out. Andre Iguodala is hurting, the season is on the line… and Kerr sees constant good news fanned out before him.
This is a great time to be a Warrior, he decided. This is such a fortunate situation.
They are short-handed, Cleveland has the momentum and James on a basketball rampage, and, yes, the walls of Oracle Arena have closed tighter around Kerr’s Warriors. The entire season is riding on one final game here Sunday evening (8 PM, ABC), a Game 7 that will either deliver them to a historical place as repeat champions with a 73-9 regular-season chaser or the kind of despair that comes with wasting a 3-1 series lead. Bring it, though. Bring all the heat and scrutiny and worry.
“If you don’t feel pressure in a Game 7 you’re probably not human,” Kerr said after the final practice for the final game. “I told our guys that. Of course they’re going to feel pressure. Of course there’s going to be some anxiety. But how lucky are we to feel that pressure. You could play on a lottery team your whole career and just make a bunch of money and go watch the playoffs every year. That sounds great.”
A sliver of sarcasm — the very end — and a big slab of straight truth. And point taken. The Warriors would rather have been wringing champagne out of their clothes by now or basking in these Bay Area afternoons made for a parade, so washed with sunshine and blue skies, as a closing act of dominance to a season they have mostly commanded from the start. But Kerr had it right: This is still a very good place to be, at home with the season on the line.
In a series tied even though Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson have been nowhere near their peak superhero Splash Brothers powers against a team they have at times controlled in these same Finals.
While the Warriors are acknowledging feeling pressure, there is no sign of panic while staring at the possibility of losing three in a row for the first time since November 2013, the season before Kerr arrived. The flight back from Cleveland after losing Game 6 by 14 points was, Curry said, “was fun because we were very, very kind of light. The attitude was really positive.” Harrison Barnes called the chance to play again “for the most part a great opportunity.”
“Well, we’re human, so when you go from up 3-1 to 3-3 it’s disappointing,” Kerr said Saturday. “But you get a couple of days, you kind of take stock. You think about where we are. We like our positioning. We like our chances. We’re at home with a chance to win the championship. You can’t ask for much more than that. And our guys are recharged already today and probably (will be) even more so tomorrow and will be ready to roll.”
With the chance to cement the storyline the way they want.
“It’s kind of the thing when you look at us on film or we look at ourselves on film, the kind of spark, you just don’t see kind of that rhythm and that flow and just the energy that we play with the offensive end,” Curry said of the Warriors of the past two outings. “Obviously we lost Game 5 and 6, not so much because we missed open shots, but also because of our defensive breakdowns. So it’s kind of you can look at and nitpick both sides. But at the end of the day, I don’t know why we haven’t been ourselves. You can look at what we haven’t done, but I couldn’t tell you the reason that we’ve been lacking in those areas besides it’s just a long, hard grind and journey to win a championship, and anything’s liable to happen. The only thing that matters is we have one game left to figure it out. At the end of the day, if we’re standing on a podium tomorrow, who cares how we got there. We got there. So that’s kind of the thing that we have to play for tomorrow.”
To get there.
To take advantage of this fortunate situation.
Scott Howard-Cooper has covered the NBA since 1988. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter.
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