When the Warriors’ season ended with a play-in loss to the Phoenix Suns on April 17, Kerr walked off the floor and told reporters he’d need a couple of weeks, some honest conversations with Joe Lacob and Mike Dunleavy, and then they’d figure out the next steps. Three weeks of conversations later, he re-signed for two more years. But before the extension talks or the uncertainty cleared, he rounded a corner in the hallway of a hotel and almost walked straight into Michael Jordan. And what the man said in that moment is the part of Steve Kerr’s story that Wright Thompson of ESPN captured that no press conference could.
“Thank you,” Kerr told Jordan. “Everything that has happened in my career is because of playing with you.” Jordan stopped him cold. “You’ve earned it,” he said. “You’ve earned all of it.”
The exchange was brief and unrehearsed, two old survivors of the Last Dance, crossing paths by accident, and it captures something essential about how Kerr has always carried his own legacy: with a deflection reflex so deeply wired that even Michael Jordan had to push back on it. The career Michael Jordan was gently refusing to let Kerr minimize includes five NBA championships as a player, four more as Golden State’s head coach, and a place alongside Phil Jackson, Red Auerbach, and Gregg Popovich as one of only six coaches in NBA history to win at least four titles.
The Jordan encounter sits inside a larger portrait Thompson painted of a 60-year-old coach wrestling with a question he is not quite ready to answer. “My wife and I have been talking about it a lot,” Kerr told Thompson. “I have a year left on my contract.”
He described the job as addictive, something that gets into you in a way that makes clear thinking about departure almost impossible. “You wanna trust yourself but also be suspicious of your own motives,” he said. “You don’t want to walk away too early, but you don’t want to walk away too late. And you worry about what your life is gonna feel like.” He did not sound like a man who had resolved anything. He sounded like a man who had been watching what happened to someone he loved and was determined not to let it happen to him.
That person was Gregg Popovich. Steve Kerr described watching his mentor navigate the same impossible question over the years, arriving at a decision, calling Kerr to say he was finally retiring, receiving his congratulations, and then signing an extension a week later. Popovich officially retired six weeks before Kerr spoke to Thompson, six months after a stroke had diminished him physically, and the people who loved him had to show him the door as gently as they could. “That hurt Steve,” Thompson wrote.
Kerr had once told Popovich he was the finest man he’d ever known. Pop smiled and said his feet were made of clay like everyone else’s. “Steve didn’t believe it then,” Thompson observed. “Now he does.” The lesson Kerr took from all of it was not comforting. “I realized he couldn’t do it,” Kerr said. “He couldn’t walk away.” Then, when Thompson asked how Kerr had avoided that trap, the coach laughed. “I’m sitting here wondering,” he said.
The New England Patriots Warning Steve Kerr Carries With Him
The self-awareness Kerr brought to Thompson’s piece extended to his fears about the franchise itself, not just his own ending, but Golden State’s. He told Thompson he does not want the Warriors to end up like the New England Patriots: a dynasty that outlasted its moment and became defined by grudges, grievances, and the slow unraveling of relationships that once produced greatness.
Kerr watched Michael Jordan retire, then unretire, then retire, then unretire, and when his friends would ask why Jordan couldn’t just go out on top, Kerr told them plainly: “Because he can’t.” He has lived close enough to that particular gravity to understand how it works. The job pulls. The identity attaches. The door you think you can walk through at any time starts to feel heavier with each passing season.
What the two-year extension means in practical terms is that Kerr will be at the helm of whatever roster Golden State assembles around Stephen Curry in the coming offseason, whether that includes LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, or Kawhi Leonard in a pursuit the front office has promised to make aggressively.
The Warriors believe he is by far the best coach for the next few seasons, a statement that doubles as a declaration of organizational ambition. He told Curry and Draymond Green after the play-in: “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I love you guys to death. Thank you.” That was a goodbye that turned into something else. Kerr is still figuring out what the right ending looks like. For now, he has at least two more years to think about it.
