Steve Kerr returns as GSW head coach; assistants Terry Stotts and Jerry Stackhouse depart

Plans to set the team up for success when they're all gone.

Steve Kerr and Mike Dunleavy had a press conference on Friday to confirm the reports that Steve Kerr will be coming back for the next two years, but Terry Stotts and Jerry Stackhouse will not return, with their contracts expired.

Super in-depth coverage of Kerr’s season

This story is a must-read for Warriors fans: an amazing, far-reaching, high-access view of Kerr’s 2025-26 season and indeed his whole life. There are lots of details about his fight against chronic pain, his lifelong struggle to deal with his own trauma around his father’s killing, and how his new therapy tries to address both together.

Here are a very small number of quotes, but I easily could have quoted 4x as much.

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.

Both Kerr and Robinson were on that Team USA staff. Steve was the head coach. Steph hadn’t shot well in the first few games of the 2024 Olympics. At an optional practice before the semifinal, he was one of only a handful of players to show up.

“Steph had one of the most impressive workouts I’ve ever seen,” Kerr said. “He would take a shot then not shoot the ball and work on footwork for 15 minutes, then take another 15 shots. He repeated it for the next hour and a half.”

He hit nine threes in the semifinal victory over Serbia, and eight more in the gold medal win over France. But it’s the practice Kerr remembered. A craftsman at work, like John McPhee’s birchbark canoe maker.

They played the Nets at home in a few hours. He’d been talking to Margot and they both agreed this should be his last season with the Warriors. He felt so grateful. He was the luckiest coach in the history of the NBA, he said, because he’d lucked into 12 years of Steph Curry. All he wanted was a classy end. If he burned the place down on the way out, then everything he said he was about was a lie. He wondered how he should announce it. He wanted to tell Lacob and Dunleavy privately, and Steph and Draymond privately, but he didn’t want it to leak and for anyone to feel disrespected. He described a vision he had of walking into the locker room after the season and telling the team. That felt badass, he told me. Maybe he should invite all four of the major stakeholders to his house.

He had time to think about it. He felt at peace, he said, but then he started talking about the things he loved about the game, and about his values, about being on the road with the team. He talked about how much he loved the 4:30 coaches meeting he had this afternoon. “I’m going to miss it terribly,” he said.

And this incredibly introspective summary of Kerr’s life and character.

“Coaching has unlocked the best version of myself,” he told me in March. “I have to constantly be evolving, thinking, growing. I have to work on myself, learning how to be kinder and gentler to myself the same way I am with others. And I’ve had to learn to fight this very human instinct that I’m not good enough. Like most people, I’m insecure. I want to be great but I don’t really know if I am or not, but I’ve learned the value of just being really kind and competitive at the same time. I’ve lived this charmed existence, an amazing life, a blessed, fortunate one, but I’ve also been through some s--- with my dad’s death and my own health the last decade. I think I’m scared that I will lose that daily engagement and purpose that not only feeds my soul, but helps me deal with my literal chronic daily pain. If I knew I could retire and go do the physical stuff that I love, it would be a lot easier. But I can’t do a lot of that stuff anymore. So I’m scared of being at home without the constant engagement and friendships that coaching brings me!”

And I can’t tell you how much I like this paragraph.

They got fired up. Kerr called Steph and told him the news. A new energy, born of the new last dance, started its steady drumbeat. They all heard it. This was an energy, born of connection between Joe, Mike, Steve, Steph and Draymond, who went on the "Inside the NBA" studio set and repeated all the themes Kerr had written to him in his letter: They might not win a title, but they would fight, and make opponents pay dearly for a win, and play hard to set the team up for success when they're all gone.

I think a lot of American fans (and maybe a lot of you… I’m not sure) simply won’t be able to understand this. It’s so deep in our culture about how winning the championship is the only thing and everything else is pointless. This is the stupidest and most toxic part of the American sports ideology.

Playing the game right; losing with character; building a legacy that outlasts you; these things matter and are the most relevant life lessons for us all. These ideals uplift us all and make sports worth playing. They also are horribly lacking in the modern way of sports. I really look forward to seeing Kerr and Steph try to ride into the sunset living up to these ideals.