Draymond Green says the Warriors were skeptical of Steve Kerr's coaching until a sage piece of advice proved true
- Draymond Green and the Warriors were skeptical of Steve Kerr's offense when he was hired in 2014.
- Green once confronted Kerr and Kerr told him the ball will find whoever needs to shoot it.
Draymond Green says he and the Golden State Warriors were highly skeptical of Steve Kerr's offense when he became head coach in 2014.
As Green explained on JJ Redick's podcast, "The Old Man and the Three," during the Warriors first training camp, Green and his teammates sometimes bristled at Kerr's instructions to move the ball and themselves.
Kerr had to prove himself to the players.
Not only was he a first-time head coach, but he was replacing Mark Jackson, a beloved coach among players who helped develop the Warriors into a playoff team.
"I remember early meetings and early practices looking at Steve like he was out of his fucking mind," Green told Redick. "This guy's preaching ball movement and 'Hey Steph, don't hold the ball, swing the ball!'"
Green noted that Jackson's offense had relied on a lot more pick-and-roll and isolations than what Kerr wanted, and it was an offensive system that had given Warriors players confidence.
"When Steve came in, he's like, 'Move the ball, move the ball!' I'm watching Steph Curry go into mixing someone, [Kerr's] like, 'Pass the ball!'"
Green said he approached Kerr one day to say that players like Curry and Klay Thompson needed to dribble the ball more to create their own shots. That's when Kerr imparted basketball wisdom onto Green that stuck with him.
"He said, 'The ball will always find the guy who's supposed to get the shot.'
"And I didn't understand that then. I'm like, 'Okay, you keep telling us to swing the ball, it's not gonna find them.' And sure enough, as we bought into the system that he was bringing to us, the ball always found Steph, it always found Klay. It always found the guys it needed to find. And it was just really a matter of us buying in."
If Warriors players had any reservations about Kerr's system initially, they were quickly erased. The Warriors began the 2014-15 season 21-2, went 67-15 on the year, and won the championship.
Kerr's advice to Green surely will remind some of legendary Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson.
As Kerr told Insider in 2018, he believes his experience as a role player under Jackson — and later Gregg Popovich — made him believe in a more team-centric style of offense.
"I think it's also a philosophical thing," Kerr said. "My background is the triangle with Phil Jackson and the motion offense of Popovich where more people are touching the ball, and I suppose I'm a little more egalitarian in my approach ... I feel maybe because I was a role player myself, I feel there's a power in everybody touching the ball and everybody sharing in the offense."
Indeed, Kerr's offense helped unlock Curry and bring him to new heights.
Curry plays differently than other star players — more willing to move off the ball, run around screens, and screen for other players rather than simply dominating the ball. He won back-to-back MVPs in Kerr's first two seasons with the Warriors.
Curry had also previously said that Kerr won him over in 2014 with his approach to handling players.
"As one of the lead guys on the team, when you have a new coach come in, it's kind of awkward at first," Curry said on "The Rex Chapman Show" in 2021. "Because we had a certain level of success, and he's coming in and trying to give us the blueprint of how to get over the hump and become a championship contending team."
Curry added: "You see how [Kerr] handles people, how he manages people, how he talks to people, how he finds ways to make sure everybody knows their role and get them to buy into it for the betterment of the entire team. That meant a lot."Eight years later, the Warriors are 36-13, 2nd in the Western Conference, preparing for a second run as a dynasty. Kerr was onto something after all.