Steve Kerr’s legacy is set in stone… but is he done adding to it?

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Steve Kerr was everywhere this summer, but returning to the formerly dynastic Warriors may paradoxically take him back out of the spotlight.

How many people have been a part of four different dynasties?

Managing to switch teams right as the Chicago Bulls’ reign was ending and the San Antonio Spurs’ was beginning, Steve Kerr won five rings between 1995 and 2003. Kerr has worked on two Gold Medal-winning Olympic teams in 2020 and 2024 as assistant and head coach, extending the United States’ 20-year dominance over international basketball. His tenure with the Golden State Warriors has yielded four more rings, which need no introduction.

Kerr has seen winning at other levels, too, from a Final Four run with the University of Arizona in 1988 to serving as general manager of a Phoenix Suns team that made the 2010 Western Conference Finals. But while plenty of people have won at multiple stages of basketball; how many have been a part of greatness at four?

With his achievements at multiple levels of the sport, Kerr is arguably the most successful basketball person of all time, pound-for-pound. He’s at least been around as much of it as just about anyone. Yet he probably wasn’t the lone centerpiece of any of his four dynasties, surrounded with more talent than most players or coaches dream of being around. Is this something that should detract from his legacy?

It’s a question worth thinking about as Kerr, now 58, enters his eleventh season leading the Golden State Warriors, because he is coming off an even brighter spotlight than normal. Kerr has become the NBA’s most public head coach, but notably lacking from his list of recent accomplishments is anything to do with the Warriors. Since winning the 2022 NBA Finals, Golden State has slid from 6th in the West in 2023 all the way to 10th this past season, unable to make it out of the first Play-In game.

That hasn’t stopped the accolades and personal successes from rolling in, as last year he inked a two-year, $35 million extension that made him the highest-paid head coach in NBA history before coaching Team USA to another Gold Medal. Kerr, who since 2016 has publicly advocated for liberal political reform, then went on to speak at the Democratic National Convention, even borrowing Stephen Curry’s “…night night” celebration, asking America to tell that to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Kerr was seemingly everywhere, but as the 2024-25 season approaches, it’s fair to wonder how much longer that will be the case.

The Warriors may have been passed by, or perhaps they just squeezed all the juice out of their decade-long orange of greatness. But for a guy with such a dynastic history, surely this isn’t just the sad swan song for one of the greatest figures in the history of basketball. Kerr’s public persona contrasted with his declining team thus begs one of the more fascinating questions that seems to be flying completely under the radar:

How much credit is he due for all this? And what will the great Steve Kerr do next?

Photo by Harry Langer/DeFodi Images via Getty Images
Steve Kerr and Warriors star Stephen Curry will both likely ride off into the sunset in the next decade. But will they do so at the same time?

Kerr’s desire to continue coaching the Warriors indefinitely is dubious at best. His extension was initially timed exactly with the end of Curry’s deal, though the latter has since extended further. And while it is entirely possible both men stick around beyond their current contracts, Kerr does not seem ready to commit to the long-term future, either.

That’s perhaps because the future of the Warriors is something between uncertain at best, and just plain bad at worst. Post-2022, Golden State attempted to toe the line between two eras: support the continued greatness of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green while developing high draft picks into the next great Warriors team, conceivably built around Jordan Poole, Jonathan Kuminga and James Wiseman.

But to say that plan simply failed would be to say that Taylor Swift is simply famous; the Warriors have spent the better part of two years trying to clean up the mess of a roster that former GM Bob Meyers haphazardly built with over-eager contracts before abandoning ship for ESPN. Wiseman was a generational bust, and Kuminga remains without an extension. To make things worse Thompson is now on the Mavericks, Green no longer feels worth the money he’s making and Poole is one of the league’s most detrimental players… on the Wizards.

The lone constant is Curry, who — as Kerr and all of us saw during the Olympics — can still conjure moments of indescribable basketball glory to lift his team above the clouds. But with the rest of the roster deteriorating, it’s understandable that Kerr would not want to put all his eggs in this basket. And no one but him knows where they may go next.

Kerr’s wide-ranging publicity tour also begs the question of evaluating greatness against its own limitations. He is undeniably one of the greatest and most successful coaches the game has ever seen, as well as one of the winningest players and the most accurate three-point shooter of all time. But has Kerr himself translated his success across the eras, or has he simply found the greenest pasture each time?

It remains true that across his nine rings and two Gold Medals, Kerr was never close to the main event. From Michael Jordan to Scottie Pippen to Tim Duncan to Curry to the… entirety of Team USA, Kerr has either played with or coached a pretty outrageous chunk of the greatest players of the last 30 years. Kerr certainly was a valuable contributor, but was he the reason for the success? And could he be going forward in a post-Curry world?

His coaching success has only come with loaded rosters stacked to the nines with all-time greats, but that may be more of a compliment than an insult. Honing the egos of generational players into a sword sharp enough to cut through the league is a talent very few possess — something guys like David Blatt and Mike Brown got fired failing to do — and is the reason Kerr can be mentioned in the same breath as Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich.

Kerr himself would be the first to tell you how much talent he’s had access to. When asked by NBA.com how the Warriors are positioned for next year and if Curry and Green need more help, he was quick to shut down the notion that they’ve lacked “help.”

“[Warriors owner] Joe Lacob, to his credit, has year in and year out spent every dollar trying to make this team great,” Kerr said after the Paris Olympics. “The rosters that have been put around Steph and Draymond… they would both tell you they can’t ask for anything more.”

Would it harm Kerr’s legacy to jump ship to a broadcasting career when Curry decides to call it a career? Would that be an admission that his decade of winning was more about the prime of a supernova athlete than any input he had? And would it be cowardly to walk away when the team needs a rudder more than ever?

The answer, as always, will surely be somewhere in between. Kerr figures to stick around for at least the next two seasons, which may add additional layers to his already complex resume. And to see Kerr remove himself entirely from basketball would be jarring, since he has spent almost four decades contributing to, improving and ultimately helping define the sport.

Ultimately, Kerr will go wherever he feels his winning nature is needed most. Greatness demands new challenges, so perhaps wading further into politics is where his heart is at. Could we one day see Governor Steve Kerr of California? Or perhaps he could become the first United States Minister of Sport, a position some feel we sorely need.

Should Kerr decide to leave the Warriors, it feels unlikely that he’ll just toil around in obscurity given how much winning he’s been around. Giving credit where credit is due isn’t a zero-sum game. Kerr may not be the first, second, or even third reason for a number of his rings, but he commands a different level of praise for his steady participation and handling of a remarkable number of situations. Greatness can be suffocating, but Kerr always found an air pocket to contribute from.

All in all, he has an understanding of winning that very few in the history of sports can match, and is at his best when he can point others in that direction. Whether it’s his achievement, or the achievement of a team can be litigated in Wikipedia articles under the “career accolades” tab later. There’s still no “I” in “team,” but there isn’t one in “Steve Kerr,” either. It’s probably not what’s allowed him to co-exist with and augment so much greatness, but it can’t have hurt, right?