For anyone who thought that Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr was playing games about leaving the franchise and heading into retirement, either to try to get more money or just get attention, it's now clear that Kerr genuinely thought about leaving and even had his mind made up at one point that he was going to walk away.
Ultimately, he may come to regret the decision to stay if the Warriors continue on their current course. After the team had an injury-plagued letdown last season, there isn't a ton of hope that things will be substantially better especially since Kerr isn't even setting expectations.
All of the team's most injury-prone veterans are just one year older, and in the case of Jimmy Butler the odds are he's going to miss a majority of the season after he tore his ACL last season. No major additions were made in the summer so fans don't have a ton of optimism that the 2026-27 campaign will be a substantial improvement over last season.
Steve Kerr has to time his exit from the Warriors just right
Perhaps Kerr is just fine with that. He knows the team is a "fading dynasty" and maybe he's perfectly content to fade into the sunset and exit the stage whenever his star player, Stephen Curry, does to ensure they can at least end their careers arm in arm.
There is nobility and grace in that, but if the next two seasons are more of the same from the Warriors and things don't really improve, many may look back and say that Kerr hung on too long when it would have been better for him to step away and allow a new leader to take the team into the future.
In a weird way, Kerr is almost like a United States Supreme Court Justice. He can pretty much stay as long as he wants, maybe not quite until death but pretty close. Yet he has to try and calculate when his time has passed and when it's time to go to ensure that the institution he is part of is set up well going forward. Perhaps the end of last season ultimately felt a little too soon, but he runs the risk of feeling like he left too late.
As Neil Young sang, "It's better to burn out, than to fade away."
If Kerr is content to fade away then he has more than earned that right with his stewardship of the team over the last dozen years. But he is taking a risk by staying on two more years, and he'll have to work hard while requiring some luck in hoping his decision to stay looks like the right one.
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