Wright ThompsonMay 14, 2026, 07:26 AM ETCloseWright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN and is executive producer of TrueSouth and co-executive producer of Backstory. He is the author of New York Times bestselling The Cost of These Dreams.Follow on XMultiple Authors
Inside Steve Kerr’s decision to stay with the Warriors (2:39)With unprecedented access this season, ESPN’s Wright Thompson traces the moment Steve Kerr nearly stepped away from the Warriors’ dynasty — and the single moment that changed everything. (2:39)
The waiter brought Kerr’s eggs. Sitting in yet another hotel breakfast room at the end of yet another long season, he sifted through memories. Like the night Klay Thompson scored 37 points in a quarter, his teammates delirious at the sight of it, Steph Curry running up and down the sidelines as the crowd got louder and louder. “It felt like we were in the presence of God,” Steve said, and when I asked why sometimes players reach a flow state, he said it was more than optimized mechanics.
Kerr ran downstairs in the dorm, hysterical, pounding on the door of two teammates. Then he went and sat alone outside on the curb.
Maybe one more season. Maybe two. When Steph Curry and Draymond Green leave, the franchise deserves a clean start, he said. Maybe he should have walked away already. “We are one injury from completely falling apart,” he said as the waiter returned to take our order.
The waiter turned to me but before I could order, Steve caught his eye and switched to a fried chicken sandwich.
He went to every doctor imaginable, a search for relief that would continue for a decade, flying up to Mayo, or down to Duke, or even to England for stem-cell therapy not approved in the United States. Nothing worked. In January of 2016 he returned to the team, leading the Warriors to an NBA-record 73 regular-season wins and taking them back to the finals, where they lost to the Cavaliers after being up three games to one. He made his health mostly off-limits in interviews.
The pressure in his head, right behind his eyes, mimicked the symptoms of papilledema. Oftentimes it felt like a huge vise cranking down on his temples. He got a full neuro workup from an expert at UC San Francisco, which came back totally normal. Three different ophthalmologists found no evidence of anything. It made him feel like he was going crazy.
Kerr moaned in mock agony as he remembered it, sitting at a café near the commercial fishing marina in San Francisco, groaning and twisting in his chair like he’d been hit with a baseball bat.
“Yes, yes, yes! I could go out to center field to shag flies … I just miss the act of movement and flow and that zen you feel.”
KERR CALLED A MEETING with his staff when the 2025-26 season schedule was released, feeling the obstacles between the Warriors and a playoff berth. The two most important voices in the room belonged to the travel guy and the performance guy, who needed to figure out how to move an aging team around the country, night after night, with a chance to win.
Kerr circled the opening 17 games, including 13 on the road and five back-to-backs. They played three games in the first four days of the season.
They won the first two games. The third game was in Portland. One of his preseason fears had been that the Warriors dynasty would be eulogized one injury report and one exhausted aging star at a time. That would come terrifyingly true in that third game. “We got destroyed,” Kerr said a few weeks later. “I think we turned it over 25 times. I regretted not resting all our stars that night.”
The league won’t let him rest Curry and Jimmy Butler if the game is on national television. If a player has made an All-Star team or an All-NBA team in the previous three years, they must be injured to sit out. Designated stars, they’re called.
A few days later he walked with his dog, Lulu, and his daughter’s dog, Mabel, through the redwood grove in the Presidio. Both dogs are English cream retrievers. Mabel rolled around in a patch of mud. Steve laughed hard. We passed through green shafts of light, cool beneath the towering canopies. The air smelled like eucalyptus. It felt prehistoric. We wound down several switchbacks and the whole bay emerged sparkling blue, with the red spans of the Golden Gate Bridge high above.
“I said, ‘We’re a fading dynasty,'” he said. “There is beauty in the struggle, fans enjoying us trying to fight until the last breath.”
He stopped and wheeled around, like the crack of a fallen branch had loosed something in him. His body language changed, a switch flipped. Clawing to the eighth seed could offer its own rewards, he thought.
He looked out at the bay and the ocean beyond, at the beautiful reach of it. At the light flashing and dancing on the water. At the currents and patterns forming and disappearing. Like karesansui, the Japanese art of arcing sand designs, a season has an ephemeral beauty, part intention and part surrender, something cherished and then lost.
Kerr had gotten a call from someone on the team’s business side. They wanted him to stop calling the team a fading dynasty. Season ticket renewals were going out. They were looking to strike a rosier note. He agreed to stop but he thought they were letting an opportunity pass, that he could sell this idea to the team, especially Steph and Draymond, who would feel most alive in the struggle. That he could sell this idea to himself.
He ran into Michael Jordan recently in the hall of a hotel. Literally rounded a corner and almost collided. The two old survivors of the last dance greeted each other with respect and love.
“Coach!” he said, and almost before Kerr could respond, he asked, “What’s gonna happen with Kuminga?”
Curry willed the team to a fourth title in 2022 but everything got tangled. The dynasty lived, but so did its replacement. They’d jumped the gun. The team felt suddenly like an untenable mixture of past and future, which threatened the present by grinding the tiki-taka to a halt. Slowly the players chosen during the two timelines era faded away. Poole left the team after Green punched him at practice. Wiseman, who never jelled with the Warriors, got traded.
THEY WENT 8-6 in the first 14 games, hovering above .500. Kerr seemed buoyed. For all the difficulty, he loved the struggle, and the idea that at its best the team could commit itself to something shared, something that elevated the Warriors and echoed moments of their past. One night after a road win, as we sat in a restaurant the Warriors had rented, he looked around at his team.
All the players ate sushi and cooked wagyu beef on hot rocks, ordering expensive bottles of wine, the sound of laughter filling the room.
He finds comfort in the 82. How in Chicago every year he goes to a show at Second City, how they like Miami but not Orlando, how the freight elevator in Madison Square Garden often smells like circus animals.
We bonded over the memory trick we both use to remember hotel room numbers moving night to night across the country.
Kerr nodded. He remembered Game 6. The stricken silence of the Utah crowd during the trophy ceremony, the stale smell of champagne on the ride from the Delta Center to the airport. They boarded the plane, music blasting.
“The plane ride was so much fun,” Kerr said. “The sense of relief when you go through two months of playoffs and you win, it’s so incredible.”
Kerr recommended a book to Nikola called “The Inner Game of Tennis,” which is a metaphysical self-help guide that divides all competitors into two people, the one who does things, and the one who offers non-stop negative commentary on them.
“That book saved my career,” Kerr said, as more sushi arrived. “I was so in my own head the whole time. I was so mean to myself. So harsh. I read it pretty much every season. I’d go back to it. I realized we are all two people. We are Self One and Self Two. There’s our body and our mind. What we all try to do, in life and in sports, is combine the two. To find the rhythm of life.”
The author, a coach, told his tennis students to pretend they were the best player in the world. Kerr decided to try that, too.
“He was built just like me,” Kerr said. “He’s my size but he was way better than me. He was free and aggressive and loose and confident and I pretended to be him and I had the best practice of my life.”
Word spread and the team just dropped to the floor. Even now Kerr can picture it. Everyone sat on the court with their own thoughts. Nobody spoke. Kerr didn’t say anything. Neither did Steph. Eventually practice just ended. Everyone slipped away.
Now the flight to Orlando was looming. 8:45. They’d face the Magic and then fly to Miami immediately after the game, for another back-to-back, then a flight across the sleeping country, landing at 3 a.m., with another game the following night.
“This is the NBA,” he said, in a voice that suggested he couldn’t imagine his life without it. He told Nikola one more story that Luke Walton told him. On the last day of Hall of Fame center Bill Walton’s life, he’d been asleep for eight hours in the bed where he would later die when he suddenly woke up and looked over at the black television screen in the room.
That yearning connects Steve Kerr and Draymond Green and Steph Curry, and Bill Russell and Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant and Bill Walton. Phil Jackson, Gregg Popovich, Lute Olson, James Naismith. Quitting basketball isn’t retiring from a job. It’s going into exile, willingly, leaving behind a world that keeps on going without you.
Sachs told him to delete the entries because he could be loose and confident and know nobody would read them, and because there was a washing clean in it, a release.
His back pain began at the same time he started to coach. Taking the Warriors job, at the pace the game and the 82 demanded, forced him to bridge the gap between his body and mind, to open the first thin lines of communication.
In the beginning he learned how to be a head coach. He understood tactics but needed his own philosophy, not a cribbed mix of Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich. As part of his preparation he got his agent to connect him with Pete Carroll in Seattle. Carroll agreed to host Steve for a few days. Kerr watched practice and took notes, listened to all the meetings, then ended each day with a debrief. On the third or fourth day, Carroll asked him a simple question.