Who is the True Leader of the Golden State Warriors?
After a recent blow up against Memphis, Golden State needs a leader to turn to. But who?
It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen being auctioned off to the Boston Celtics for pennies on the dollar. Step one, NBA superteam gets formed. Step two, superteam is super, featuring many superstars. Step three, superteam runs into adversity and must gather up its big boy britches and turn its eyes toward the team’s true leader before finding ultimate success.
And so we come to the 2016–17 Golden State Warriors, a team of four superstars. Unlike Miami Thrice and Boston’s Three Amigos, these Warriors were different. They were a preexisting superteam, already an NBA champion and coming off the greatest regular season in history, before adding Kevin Durant to make a super duper Voltron team.
These Warriors had proven how to win and already had leadership in place, and Kevin Durant would just slide neatly into the Harrison Barnes slot and leave Golden Slate to crush everyone in their path.
And so it was… right up until it wasn’t.
You saw the highlights against Memphis over the weekend. The Warriors held a 24-point third quarter lead against the Grizzlies, a team playing its third road game in four nights and one not exactly known a style of play conducive to huge comebacks. And yet the Warriors went ice cold, 2-for-13 from the field in the fourth quarter, as the Grizz clawed all the way back to pull the deficit to two with a minute remaining.
And that was when it happened — the play we’ll be talking about until this version of the Warriors manages to cut the nets down in June. Steph Curry missed yet another long shot but the Warriors got an offensive rebound and pulled it out to run clock and set up a play. They could run down the clock to around 15 seconds now and, if they scored, all but end the game.
You know what happened next. Newcomer Kevin Durant called for the ball off a visibly annoyed Steph Curry — that’s reigning unanimous MVP Steph Curry, who scored 40 points that very game — and Draymond Green threw a veritable fit right there on the court during the play. Durant dribbled the ball for ten seconds before bricking a lazy contested iso three, a shot he can literally get on every possession ever, while neither Steph nor Draymond nor Klay moved off the ball all possession or even stepped inside the arc to go for the rebound.
After Draymond Green chewed KD out during the Memphis timeout, he himself got beat by Mike Conley on the tying jumper. Then Curry missed a 35-footer at the buzzer to send the game into overtime, where the Ws would fall apart further and lose.
It was ugly, it was embarrassing, and it was exactly the sort of moment the naysayers have been waiting on all season, one they’ll continue to bring up until proven otherwise in the Finals. At a critical moment, the Warriors collapsed. Curry was overruled. Durant tried to lead and failed. Klay Thompson was invisible. And Draymond pouted in the corner.
So who exactly will step up and lead these Warriors the next time they face a key moment?
Steph Curry?
Shouldn’t Curry be the leader? After all, he just put up one of the greatest individual NBA seasons of all time, becoming only the 11th man in history to win back-to-back MVPs and the first ever to do it unanimously. Curry is single-handedly redefining how the game is being played over the past few seasons. He’s the one drawing standing-room-only crowds at arenas around the league, and he’s the one that made the call and the big spotlight sacrifice bringing Kevin Durant aboard.
Curry is the Dwyane Wade on this team, the Paul Pierce. He was here when things weren’t so pretty, and he’s the reason they changed. He is the Golden State Warriors, so he should be the leader.
And he has been at times. He was a leader for much of the past two seasons, and we saw it in the incredibly entertaining Warriors highlight reel that took over ESPN and social media night after night. Curry’s leadership style is wild and fancy-free and his Warriors took the same note.
They weren’t just beating teams — they were obliterating them. They threw between-the-legs bounce passes and hit long fade-away threes, giggling as they ran back down the court. That is how Stephen Curry plays basketball and that was how he led the Warriors as one of the league’s most irresistible and fun teams ever (for awhile, even if you don’t like to admit it now).
But that wild and carefree attitude also rears its head at the worst times. Missed heat checks from 30 turn into run-outs on the other end. Wild Globetrotter passes turn easy fast breaks into turnovers. Worst of all, with the entire season hanging in the balance last June, Curry’s casual attitude reappeared as he threw a lazy behind-the-back pass in the general direction of Klay Thompson late in the fourth quarter of Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
It was a play that came to define the Warriors failure and blown 3–1 lead, and it will haunt Steph Curry until he wins another ring. It was a play that came as the result of a meltdown in leadership at the worst moment possible.
Draymond Green?
But wait, weren’t the Warriors actually Draymond’s team the whole time? Isn’t that the whole thing about Steph being MVP of the league but Draymond being MVP of the team? Is Draymond Green the true Golden State leader?
In many ways, he is. I contended for The Cauldron that Draymond Green is the most important player on the Warriors this season, maybe in the entire NBA. He is the heart and soul of this Warriors squad. He is their passion and energy, and he is the brash confidence that pushes Curry to the next level.
It was the insertion of Draymond into the lineup when David Lee was injured that started this whole Warriors thing, not Curry or Thompson. Draymond is the key to the Death Lineup, and he is the focal point of the stingy defense that may be the team’s secret guiding compass. It was Draymond Green who showed up biggest in Game 7 and nearly saved the season last June.
Of course all that passion and energy, all that brash confidence, is sometimes a bit too much. That same Draymond is the one repeatedly flailing his legs at opponents’ nether regions. For all Draymond did in Game 7, he’s also a big reason they were still playing that late after his Game 5 suspension for punching LeBron James in the King’s jewels.
Passion is great until it’s uncontrollable. Suddenly we use words like “wild” and “reckless” instead and Draymond looks a lot more like Rodman than Jordan, often in the most key and unfortunate times.
Could Draymond need someone else to be a steadying leader presence?
Kevin Durant?
Perhaps it’s the new guy that ought to be the Warriors’ 2017 leader. Think of the superteams above. Dwyane Wade and Paul Pierce are Hall of Fame players, but didn’t both eventually have to admit that it was LeBron and Kevin Garnett who were the heart and soul of the team?
Kevin Durant is the Warrior near the top of the MVP standings this year, not Steph or Draymond. He’s the one leading the team in points and rebounds, he’s become a defensive force and the team’s best rim protector, and he is proving to be the consistent, transcendent talent on the squad.
There’s one problem — Kevin Durant does not appear to be a natural leader. He’s never been one to shine in crunch time, and he hasn’t come through in the biggest moments of his career. After all, his Oklahoma City Thunder blew a 3–1 lead of their own last year and never won a ring together. Instead of embracing the biggest spotlight, Durant has a history of shrinking from it.
Russell Westbrook was the heart and soul of that Thunder team. You could see it last season, and you can see it now. Durant wasn’t really a leader on the Olympic teams either. Even as a veteran, Durant has fallen into the shadows behind Carmelo Anthony and others. Now along with everything else, Durant finds himself an NBA villain, a spot LeBron similarly struggled to adjust to for several seasons.
Durant may not be ready to be the leader of the Warriors team this year. He may not be ready ever.
Klay Thompson?
No. Just stop. Klay embraces the second (or third or fourth) banana role and loves to blend in and play his role.
And it’s not going to be Shaun Livingston or Andre Iguodala either, nor David West or Anderson Varejao.
So If It’s None of Those Guys… Then Who??
Luckily, Golden State has one other secret weapon.
His name is Stephen Douglas Kerr.
Kerr is a man many have taken for granted. He is the fortunate caretaker of an incredible collection of talent, handed the keys to a kingdom that anyone would find success in.
But what if he isn’t?
Wasn’t it Steve Kerr who put Draymond Green in the starting lineup two years ago, then kept him there when the franchise’s highest-paid player David Lee returned from injury? Isn’t Kerr the one who built this devastating offense around two otherworldly shooters, and isn’t he the one that unleashed last year’s version of Stephen Curry upon the world? Ask Mark Jackson if you think those were the easiest things in the world to do.
It was Kerr who trusted his guys to play small ball and outwit a bigger league. He was the one who benched Andrew Bogut in the 2015 Finals for Andre Iguodala down two games to one, unleashing the then-unknown Death Lineup upon the league. Kerr is the guy that became the first rookie head coach to win an NBA championship since Pat Riley in 1982.
Steph and Klay are the Warriors’ proof that 3>2, but Steve Kerr is the mad scientist who put the hypothesis to the test.
Steve Kerr is the Warriors true leader, a guy who has seen more than his fair share of superteams.
Do you think it’s a coincidence Kerr is a six-time NBA champion? Steve Kerr is a guy both Phil Jackson and Greg Popovich — two of the five greatest NBA coaches of all time — consistently turned to. He played next to Jordan, Pippen, and Rodman, shared minutes with Duncan, Admiral, Parker, and Manu. Kerr’s team has been the favorite more than his fair share of times, and he has won often and learned from the biggest winners of multiple NBA generations.
And Steve Kerr is no stranger to facing adversity.
In 1984, Steve’s father Malcolm was assassinated by the Islamic Jihad (a precursor to Hezbollah) in Lebanon, where he was the president at American University. Steve was just a freshman at the University of Arizona at the time. He stayed at Arizona and played basketball there. It was a connection to his father and an escape from reality.
Steve’s father was not the first Kerr to serve a people in need. His grandfather Stanley volunteered after the Armenian genocide, rescuing women and orphans in Aleppo (yes, that Aleppo) before settling in Lebanon.
Steve Kerr knows adversity. He’s seen his father and his grandfather face real adversity, things much bigger than a difficult basketball opponent.
Once during his senior year against rival Arizona State, opposing fans chanted “your father’s history” and “P.L.O.” all game long, digging mercilessly at the lowest, worst moment of Steve Kerr’s life. It was a horrible, detestable thing to do. Kerr responded by shooting 6-for-6 from downtown in the first half, racking up 20 points before halftime.
Adversity? Yeah, Steve Kerr knows adversity.
This is a scrawny 175-pound white kid taken 50th in the 1988 draft who struggled to find consistent playing time with Phoenix, Cleveland, and Orlando before finally finding a role for the defending champion Chicago Bulls in 1993–94.
That scrawny kid who couldn’t catch on with an NBA team until age 28 would go on to win five NBA titles as a player and retire with the greatest three-point percentage in NBA history. Of all the Bulls threepeat stars, it was Steve Kerr who had the guts to tell Michael Jordan he would be ready in the final moments of Game 6 of the 1997 Finals before hitting the title-winning shot seconds later.
Kerr was still playing ball at age 37 for the San Antonio Spurs, though “playing” is overstating it. As the Spurs fought deep into the Western Conference Finals, Kerr had played only 13 minutes all playoffs and hadn’t made a single field goal since the regular season. It was at that moment in Game 6 that Popovich turned to him — you probably remember how it turned out. Kerr came in cold and went 4-for-4 from downtown in a spectacular shooting array, helping the Spurs to another Finals berth and a second title before riding off into the sunset.
Yet again, Kerr had risen up at the moment of greatest adversity and come through for his team. Again, he had led.
Without Steve Kerr, there may never have been a second Bulls threepeat or a Spurs dynasty.
And unless these Warriors turn to Steve Kerr as the true leader of their team, they may miss their chance to join them.
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