Steve Kerr has visibly aged in his time as an NBA coach, which makes sense given that (a) he will turn 60 during his next training camp, and (b) Thursday's game in Brooklyn will be his 1,000th between regular and postseason, give or take the 55 games he missed but was given credit for while recovering from back surgery. He has also been a general manager for three years in Phoenix under noted loonball Bob Sarver, worked alongside Marv Albert at ESPN (which is to say listened to Marv Albert), nearly took the Knicks job when they were embarking on a seven-year stretch of .315 basketball, voiced himself on an episode of Clone High scouting for something called "Tropical Hospital," and has worked alongside all the versions of Draymond Green for more than a decade. Hell, with all that he should look like Dick Van Dyke sticking his head out of a speeding car window, spaniel-style.
But Kerr has managed all this while seeming like a much younger fellow in spirit, which in the industry is almost as revivifying as casting your get-out-of-jail-free-card lot with Stephen Curry.
Thus, people are surprised when Kerr goes on one of his delightfully predictable old-school rants about the scourge of traveling in basketball. Complaining about traveling is his hardiest rhetorical perennial. He's good for a couple of these every year, minimum, and when the subject is presented to him he inevitably sounds like Bill Belichick expounding on long snappers. He'll do 10 scripted minutes, 10 more of pure improv, and then take heckles from the audience, Jimmy Carr–style.
So there he was Monday night after a harrowing 18-point win over Charlotte—and when we say "harrowing," we of course mean "by about half of what the margin should be when the opponent is the Hornets":
“Everyone sees it,” Kerr said. “I just think we can do a better job. It’s about the way we are teaching it. These [officials] are awesome. They have brutal jobs and they have a million things to watch. But footwork is the entire basis of the game, and we need to call traveling. It will be a much better game if we clean it up.”
The impetus for this latest soliloquy was the tantrum/technical combo plate he offered up after a LaMelo Ball European Union step late in the third quarter of an uncommonly close game. Kerr was conciliatory to the officials, choosing not to excoriate veteran Michael Smith for ringing him up, but instead took a swipe at the league office for not making traveling more of a point of emphasis "for the good of the game."
It is at moments like this, even when he's using his inside voice, that he sounds like your great uncle Stretch, even if a case can be made that he is correct. Lots of people slag off the NBA game these days for any number of reasons, but Kerr is almost certainly the only one who still says that the problem is traveling. Since this has been his crusade du jour for most of his 4,000 jours on the job, he has become both predictable and adept at making his case, and the fact that he has been making it this long suggests that he is preaching to the unconvinceable.
At this point, frankly, it's just nice to know he still is an unabashed old-school guy at a time when the generational divide between young'uns and old'uns is at its rhetorical height. With Gregg Popovich still recovering from his stroke, Kerr is the fifth-oldest coach in the league and second in tenure with his current team, so he comes by his rulebook stodginess honestly. But at some point, you wonder when he will just give up and teach his team to simply refuse to dribble. You know, just to make the kind of point that your old man would make when he's reached the end of his tether. All "for the good of the game."
