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OAKLAND, Calif. – Steve Kerr has eight diamond rings commemorating his eight NBA championships. Five of these rings come from his playing career – 1996, 1997 and 1998 with the Chicago Bulls, then 1999 and 2003 with the San Antonio Spurs – and three of these come from his coaching career which, surprisingly, began only four years ago. when he was hired to become the Golden State Warriors coach.
He never wore these rings until the night he received them. He has never heard of his teammates or his players. The rings stay in their boxes at home. One of the reasons is practical: they are much too big to be really worn. But the second and perhaps most important reason is that the rings feel too individual. These are the banners – the ones hanging high in Oracle Arena, a testimony of the accomplishment of a team, a culture and an entire organization – that matter most.
"When the banner comes up," said Kerr Tuesday, a few hours before the start of the ceremony, "it's at that point that it's happening at home and you're sharing it with the fans and that you hear the vibration in the building ".
Tuesday night – "Ring Night", which Kevin Durant described as a "distraction" that "tends to be a bit of a shame", and that Steph Curry called "the weirdest night of the year" – Adam, NBA Commissioner Silver was on hand to help distribute the material. Kerr called them "stupid, ridiculous and ridiculous in many ways, but brilliantly" He put on his new ring – reversible, with 74 diamonds representing each victory – and made a face as if the ring weighed 50 pounds. The rings of the players descended on shiny metal ropes from the ceiling of the arena. Klay Thompson, sporting his new fresh beard, took his ring and placed it on his little finger. Curry picked up the microphone and shouted, "Let's celebrate it to the max!" The arena count took place and, in the corner of the closest arena to the Warriors' bench, the third banner of the Warriors over the last four years was unfurled.
It was 19:41 on the west coast. The crowd went wild and less than a minute later, the lights of the house lit up. Curry curled up on the floor and pretended to snuggle up with his ring. As the players danced and posed for the cameras, the Oklahoma City Thunder came out of the tunnel and started warming up. Fifteen minutes and 10 seconds after the fall of the banner, at 19:56, Damian Jones, the young start of the Warriors, was facing the Thunder's Steven Thunder, on the central court, where the trophy Larry O. Brien stood was a few minutes ago. a table. The ball was thrown into the air, which marked the start of the 2018-1919 Warriors season and another chapter of one of the NBA's largest dynasties.
Here are the dynasties: they can start when you do not pay attention. How many people saw in the 2013-14 Warriors the seed that would quickly become one of the greatest dynasties in the NBA of all time? – and they can degrade even before a decline.
When, in 2010, Joe Lacob bought Warriors, a franchise that had only had eight winning seasons since 1979, he made a bold statement at his press conference. "If at the end of the day, no other banners hang up there, we failed," said Lacob that day.
"Everyone laughed," Kerr recalled on Tuesday. "I laughed … I was at home:" Go, the warriors? & # 39; Joe set the goal that night. I think there was a young man named Steph Curry in the building, who turned around as he crystallized. "
The Warriors did not seem to have lost their sparkle in the championship after the distribution of the rings and the deployment of the banner on Tuesday. Of course, there was a lot of rust – a Klay Thompson turnover a few seconds after the start of the match, one of 13 turnovers in the first half for the Warriors, and the Warriors getting bombed early in the third quarter by a team from the Thunder who ultimately remembers shooting, and a team that usually looked at Kerr as if his conditioning was not up to scratch. This is not the beautiful basketball for which the Warriors have become known. As Kevin Durant said later, it was difficult to play basketball on the East Coast: we will have to enjoy these games from us. "
But most of all, the Warriors looked like what we were expecting from them: the best team in the NBA. Their first basket was a Curry corner three, their second a treadmill in Durant's traffic, two of the best ever. Kerr had said earlier in the day that his biggest concern was the defense of his team, specifically at the central position, where the Warriors trotted off three young centers on Tuesday – starter Damian Jones, as well as Kevon Looney and Jordan Bell – but all the young looked good. Jones, who, according to Kerr, will remain the team's starting center for the time, has 12 points and three blocks in 27 minutes. Looney, who according to Kerr had the best training camp of the three youngsters, had 10 points, 10 rebounds and two blocks in 18 minutes. Anyway, every time Boogie Cousins comes back from his ripped Achilles tendon, the Warriors will add one more All-Star player, and this All-Star play center will play a temporary role.
We are talking about warriors with a sense of inevitability, as the 2018-19 season will end – will end, complete stop – with another Warriors championship banner deployed by the Bay. But nothing is guaranteed. Tuesday morning at the Warriors Practice Center, when I sat down with Kerr, I asked him how he was preventing that feeling of inevitability from bleeding into his locker room.
He shrugged.
"We are used to it," he said. "I think about 2015, our first year, when we won the championship, it was so new, but since then we've gone through everything, we've seen it all, we lost at home in a seventh game of the Finals. we've won a few titles and all year long there's always that kind of thing, you're just learning how to get out of it, there's going to be adversity, we're going to lose two or three next, and everyone will say: "Oh my God, the warriors have big problems." You're just moving on. Because you know it's only about noise. "
There will be a lot of noise around these Warriors this season, but all this noise can be summed up in this one question: how long can this dynasty last? Will he act from the last year of this core group that remains together as Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant determine what their 2019 independent agency will look like? Or can it last two, three or four more years, surpassing Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls (and Steve Kerr's) as the NBA's largest dynasty of the modern NBA? Or will the decline begin this season, sooner than any of us will imagine, as the Warriors get older and as other teams – the Houston Rockets or the US. Utah Jazz in the west, maybe the Boston Celtics or the Toronto Raptors in the East – keep getting up?
For Kerr, his role is: not to think too much about the past and not to think too much about the future. Tuesday night, the Warriors had their rings, then they won a basketball game. The page has returned from last season to this season. Kerr did not want to look any further.
"What we are trying to do is remind our guys how lucky we are to be in this position," Kerr told me. "We want to enjoy it as long as it lasts, maybe it will last a few more seasons, who knows, maybe you do not know what's going on in the NBA."
"Or," he added, "in life."
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