Steve Kerr can breathe! Like Gregg Popovich before him, he brought home the gold from the Olympic Games, and that’s all that matters in the United States. “Either we win or we fail” he explained in June about his mission. In the United States, there are no half measures, and the Warriors coach has achieved his goal: Team USA is Olympic champion for the fifth time in a row.
“The players do all the work. We just try to give them some tips and some ideas about what FIBA basketball is all about,” Steve Kerr explained about his role. “But more importantly, it’s all the things you can experience as a group. That’s why these guys do it and that’s why we get involved as coaches. You can’t buy that feeling. You can’t buy the experience of working with a group and doing something unique like that.”
How to create a collective in a month?
If Steve Kerr is taking a back seat, his players have never stopped praising his qualities as a manager. Starting with Stephen Curry who obviously knows him very well, but who discovered him as a coach of a national team. “He was a great inspiration to us to stay focused on our mission. He was able to remain realistic about the difficulty of the task,” explains the Warriors leader. “Steve is obviously very good at making sure the mission is the priority. There’s been a lot of noise around our team. I don’t envy his position of having to find minutes for everybody. Rotations are tough. At the end of the day, it’s all about winning, and I think he does a great job of making the mission the priority.”
An opponent of Steve Kerr in the NBA, Jrue Holiday discovered him as a coach. The Celtics leader was not an All-Star this season, but his profile was indispensable to the team.
“Steve has done a remarkable job of bringing us together in a short space of time, whereas teams like France, Serbia or Germany have been playing together since they were kids,” underlines the leader. “Steve has allowed us to create cohesion and become a real team in such a short time.”
The torch passed to Erik Spoelstra?
Like Vincent Collet, Steve Kerr has had his last game in the national team. His mission was the World Cup and the Olympic Games. Erik Spoelstra should take over, and Steve Kerr is optimistic for the future with a next generation led by Anthony Edwards and Tyrese Haliburton, but also Paolo Banchero.
“That’s what we appreciate: having already involved some of these young people and in the team so that they can be part of the next group”, concludes Steve Kerr. “Actually, we were already thinking about it when we put the team together. We just put together the best possible group to win now and we’ll worry about 2028 in four years.”
