Barber: Warriors’ wins are tribute to Steve Kerr

OAKLAND - Steve Kerr wasn't at Warriors practice Wednesday. Instead, he made a trip to Stanford Medical Center for more testing. Kerr is in misery right now, still dealing with the debilitating headaches that have plagued him for nearly two years.

His team? It seems to be feeling fine.

Golden State just won back-to-back playoff games against the Trail Blazers without Kerr on the bench. Steph Curry's shooting form wasn't affected by the coach's absence, nor was Kevin Durant's first step or Draymond Green's ability to protect the basket.

The Warriors were just as good in Games 3 and 4 of their Western Conference first-round series as they were in Games 1 and 2 - a fact that might tempt you to conclude that Kerr isn't all that crucial to this team's long-term success.

In fact, the opposite is true. The Warriors' seamless transition in sweeping Portland was the ultimate tribute to Kerr and his philosophy.

Steve Kerr has many admirable traits as a coach. He is frequently lighthearted but occasionally tempestuous, and he usually heads in one direction or the other at the right time. He expresses himself well and brings a variety of personal and professional experiences to the job. But Kerr's most noteworthy quality - and one of the primary factors driving Golden State's unprecedented three-year run of success - is his willingness to include and delegate.

Speaking Wednesday on 95.7 The Game, Warriors general manager Bob Myers referred to Kerr's “horizontal leadership” structure.

“His coaches' meetings and his practices, it's not his voice 80 percent of the time,” Myers told host Greg Papa. “… So at a moment like this, when people need to step up, they've been speaking in practice, they've been speaking in meetings, they've been speaking in the locker room. … Obviously, it's an absence, it's a void. But it's not one that we can't overcome.”

Everyone seems to have a story about Kerr's inclusiveness, but a couple of examples from the 2015 postseason stand out.

When the Warriors fell behind Memphis two games to one in the second round that year, it was Ron Adams, Kerr's top defensive assistant, who suggested a fix: Have center Andrew Bogut guard the Grizzlies' much-smaller Tony Allen from the paint, in essence daring Allen to shoot. Spoiler alert: He's not a very good shooter. Golden State won the next three games to advance.

Against Cleveland in the NBA Finals that year, it was another 2-1 deficit and another strategic solution. This one saw Kerr send Bogut to the bench in favor of Andre Iguodala, normally the Warriors' top bench player. Again, the result was three consecutive wins, plus a Finals MVP trophy for Iguodala. That idea sprang not from a veteran NBA coach but from Nick U'Ren, then a 28-year-old assistant who spent most of his time cutting up film.

“As a player, I've been on different organizations where not every coach had a voice or even spoke a lot,” assistant coach Jarron Collins told me a couple weeks before U'Ren's moment of glory. “I think that we do a really good job of making sure that everybody from coaches to advance scouts to our video guys, everybody has a voice.”

What's remarkable is that Kerr not only considers and accepts such advice, but is willing to publicly acknowledge the source. That's a measure of true ease and confidence, and something that Kerr's predecessor did not possess.

We all can acknowledge that Mark Jackson did a good job with the Warriors before they fired him in 2014. He took the team to its first back-to-back playoff appearances since 1991-92. But he appeared to hit a ceiling, and that may have had something to do with his staff. Jackson was too suspicious to surround himself with top-caliber assistants, and too paranoid to share credit with them.

Contrast that with Kerr, who has gone after some of the brightest coaches in the game to fill out his bench. Guys like Adams, Alvin Gentry (who just wrapped up his second season as head coach of the Pelicans), Luke Walton (highly regarded coach of the Lakers) and Mike Brown, currently serving as interim coach as Kerr deals with his medical condition.

“When you talk to him, or he gets on you, you don't feel threatened,” Brown said of Kerr on Wednesday. “And there's some coaches out there that even if they don't say a single word, just their mere presence, you feel threatened. And when you feel threatened, everyone's human, a lot of times that means they're gonna get defensive right away. And so that's not a great mix. And Steve, I mean his presence, he's very approachable at all times.”

Brown said he is constant communication with Kerr. They spoke at length after the Jazz-Clippers game on Tuesday night. (The Warriors await the winner of that series.) Brown shares his “minutes sheet” - the plan for rotating players - with Kerr before each game, and the head coach has been able to address the team here and there.

During games, though, the decisions are Brown's to make.

There is no timetable for Kerr's return, except for a declaration that it won't happen until his pain ebbs for several days in a row. He might be back in the second round. Or he may never be back at all.

That sounds melodramatic, but it's a real possibility. Kerr hasn't felt right since back surgery resulted in spinal-fluid leakage in the summer of 2015. Imagine the agony this intensely competitive man - I mean, he once fought Michael Jordan at practice when they were teammates with the Bulls - must be experiencing to miss playoff games. It isn't hard to conceive of a scenario in which Kerr walks away to focus on finding a cure, or at least relief.

And what a poignant departure that would be, Kerr building a structure so deftly - so horizontally - that he could remove himself like a Jenga piece and watch the team remain whole.

“It's like when a kid leaves a home,” Myers noted on the radio. “He says, ‘You can handle this. I raised you, and you can do it.'”

Parents don't really ask anything from their children beyond contentedness. They just want to know that their sons and daughters are stable, happy, self-reliant.

You'd like to think Steve Kerr is feeling a bit of that as he watches the Warriors play these days, aware of his contributions but knowing that, at least for the time being, their fate is out of his hands.

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.