The Bill Simmons Podcast - Book of Basketball 2.0: An Excerpt From the Steve Kerr Episode | The Bill Simmons Podcast

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

The Book of Basketball 2.0 podcast is live! Here’s an excerpt from the second episode with Steve Kerr about two times “The Secret” was threatened during his time with Chicago and Golden State. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's special mini preview of the Book of Basketball 2.0 podcast feed, which has launched today. And I hope you subscribed on Apple, on Spotify, on Stitcher, on Google Play, wherever you listen to your podcasts. It's brought to you by State Farm. Just like basketball, life can be unpredictable. That's why State Farm agents are there to help with over 19,000 agents. A local State Farm agent could be just around the block,

whether you talk in person, by phone, or through the app. State Farm is there. So go with the one with coverage and agents you can count on. State Farm, talk to an agent. Today, we're also brought to you by TheRinger.com and The Ringer Podcast Network. Okay, so we launched four episodes today on the Book of Basketball 2.0 podcast. The first one was the prologue. It is called The Secret is Now Rented. If you remember from my 2009 basketball book, I wrote about the secret of basketball. I won't spoil it for you, but this is about in 2019.

Has that changed? So that's up. The second one is with Steve Kerr, guardian of the secret for the last 25 years. It is a long conversation with him about that and a lot of other things, and especially what happened with him with the Warriors the last couple of years. Third one, Ryan Rosillo. We did a pyramid podcast about Stephen Curry.

Not only his credentials to be in the top 25, but also an amazing career that really is going to probably be the first thing we think about when we think about basketball in the 2010s. And then the fourth one is actually a flashback. It is the Rewatchables podcast we did on this feed, Oklahoma City versus Golden State, game six, 2016, AKA the Clay Thompson game, but a game that changed the course of the decade in the NBA in a bunch of different ways and was also the craziest game of the decade in the NBA in a bunch of different ways and was also the craziest game of the decade. So we couldn't talk about Curry and the secret and this whole Warriors decade without also putting that in the feed as well.

So those are the four podcasts. What I'm about to play you is about a 12, 13-minute stretch of the conversation Steve Kerr and I had about two moments in his career, one with the Bulls and one with the Warriors, when the secret was threatened by something that happened with those teams. So you are about to hear that. This is from the second episode of the Book of Basketball 2.0 podcast. Here it is. You're part of two things that are really interesting in this whole dynamic of when a team gets threatened. You go back to 94. Scotty gets mad they don't call the game-winning play for him

and decides not to go back in. And that leads to Kukoc makes the game-winner. This is the Knicks series. And you go in the locker room, and Phil Jackson decides he's going to let the players handle it. He doesn't go in. And then everybody handles it.

And Bill Cartwright famously is crying. He's so upset. He feels so betrayed by Scotty. This is your first year after Michael Jordan left. And you're going to do that to us. And that was the kind of moment that breaks the team, but it didn't seem like it broke you guys. No, it made it stronger.

And that was part of Phil's genius. He knew when to turn the team over to the players. And I remember he came in and he said, I'm going to go talk to the media. I have to do my job and I'm going to protect you, Scotty, as best I can. But Bill Carl Wright wants to say a couple words, and that's where internal leadership and veteran leadership is so important because Bill just laid it out there.

He just said exactly what needed to be said which was you know we we do this together we trust each other all year long and it's about us and all of a sudden you lose that that that connection like it just can't happen and bill was he was bawling one of the most powerful moments i've ever experienced as a player or a coach and scotty was one of the great teammates I've ever had. It was just such a huge screw up on his part. Yeah. It was a one-time deal though. And that's what I hate when people think of that,

when they think of Scotty. Some people bring that up first. Like, I remember when Scotty didn't go back in the game because Scotty was an amazing teammate. You know, he was a guy who sort of kept us together when Michael was, you know, just. I mean, he was an MVP candidate that year. He was phenomenal. He won like 53 or 54.

He was so, so good as a player, but also a great teammate. And but Bill's talk and then Scottie, to his credit credit apologized that day and the next day and and everybody loved Scotty so much we all accepted his apology and and we we just moved on and it was fine my whole thing about him in my book was all about like fuck you if you're gonna judge him by that one thing like this guy was like this guy played, in the 98 finals, he can't even move. Yeah. He's in that game six, that Utah game. His back is so bad, like he can't bend over.

That's right. And he's, I don't know. I just think that guy, I have him, I still think he's a top 30 all-time guy. And I think him and Kawhi, I think, are the two best defensive players I've ever seen in my life at that position. Yeah, yeah. I'm partial. having coached.

Well, playing with Scottie and then coaching Andre Iguodala, I think Andre is at that level. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. And I caught Andre really in the last five years of his career, but he reminded me so much of Scotty in terms of the intelligence and the awareness of all five spots and kind of controlling the action,

especially away from the ball, like blowing stuff up very subtly. But Andre reminded me a lot of Scotty. And yeah, Scotty was the um, he was the best defensive player that I, I played with for sure. Um, so that was one thing. The second thing happened last year with the Warriors and I went to the game, the Clippers game, Draymond and KD getting argument on the court and it gets super intense in the huddle. And it actually seemed like they were going to like start shoving each other on the court. And I knew it was going on because I was watching it in the huddle and I could see something bad was happening.

And then it goes, you finish the game, you lose in overtime. Now you're in the Phil Jackson spot. Yeah. So were you thinking like, oh, this is like the Pippen thing? Should I let the players handle this or do you get involved? Well, it's different like the pippin thing should i let the players handle this or do you get involved well it's different than the than the uh the pippin thing because um this was two guys who were um you know about ready to fight yeah and so it was more a case of uh you know we're gonna have to handle this we're gonna have to let everything simmer and then handle it later and so we so you just here goes to get them away from each other.

Yeah, like let's just, let's get out of here. Let's get on the plane and go home and sort through it. So we got out of there pretty quickly. I think I addressed it, but we didn't, you know, everybody, there was so much raw emotion in the locker room. We couldn't, we weren't going to resolve anything that night for sure. And that was the beginning. Actually, it wasn't even the beginning. It was probably more a result of what we had started to feel late the season before, where the team was starting to

drift a little bit. We were losing some of that connection. And then it kind of continued into camp in the early part of the season. There was just sort of an unspoken tension that was there that Draymond couldn't deal with it. And he just snapped, and it opened up a pretty big wound. So Draymond, this whole time, he feels like he's one of the leaders of the team and he feels like this guy has one foot out the door even though they just won two straight titles right and it's just bothering him and bothering him as a coach you're like at some point this is gonna come out or this is gonna Yeah. And, and as a coach, you know, you want to make sure each,

each guy is okay. And each guy is ready to move forward. And, and so, um, you know, the way you have to handle that is you, you meet individually with, with, um, with players all the time anyway. And then you try to, you try to sort through it. One thing, you know, I've, I've now coached Draymond. This is my sixth year coaching the Warriors now. And, um, so Draymond and I know each other really well. Um, he needs some conflict to motivate himself and, uh, and I embrace that. Um, and he and I have gotten into it every single year, multiple times, and it's okay because that's what that's, you know, he needs the conflict to conflict to get motivated, to get energized. In this particular case with Kevin, it was too much.

And it's something that happened on national TV. And now you open up the whole world to – you've invited the whole world to scrutinize your team. And, and so now there's so many distractions, uh, that it becomes really difficult to deal with this. It happened at a practice, you know, you can, you can cover it up. And, uh, actually we had several things over the, over the past few years that have happened that never made it out that, and we're very proud of that. Yeah. But this thing, uh, because it was so public, uh, became a season long story. You know, anytime we hit any rough patch, there was a reference to that night in LA early in the season. And is that still an impact? And it's just a

question you have to keep asking or answering to the media and it's, it becomes a distraction. And so it followed us around, but it was kind of the theme of last year. It really was. We just had a lot of that. It was also a very modern last decade problem for the team dynamic where I just, this never happened before really the decision with LeBron where you have people like me on a podcast constantly speculating

on what's going to happen. Where's this guy going? You think they'll stay together? Is he going to go here? This is last year. Maybe they'll trade him. And that's just become part of what's made basketball, I think, blow up as a 12-month-a-year sport now. When we started Grantland in 2011, basketball was an eight-month sport, the nfl was a 12-month sport we never it was never a situation where the season has ended now we got the draft now we have free agency now it's now we get july and then it's training camp and it just goes on and on and on and people always wondering what's going to happen here what's going to happen there and i do feel like your team really took the brunt of that.

But I think it's the first of what will happen now going forward. Like if the Lakers, I know you can't talk about other teams, but if that starts off badly, people will start talking about it. Oh, maybe Davis won't stay and then they'll do that whole dance. Right, right. That's just how we do it now. Yeah, I mean, I think the interesting dynamic is how all these pieces fit together.

LeBron leaving Cleveland for Miami kind of established a precedent for superstar players. Like, okay, you can actually leave. And actually, that was a great move for LeBron, right? Everyone crushed him at the time. And yet, oh, yeah, now you can look at it and go, well, that was really smart. You know, that was a really important time in his career, right? But combine that fact, right, the superstar players now willing to move in free agency, combine that with the dollar amounts we're talking about in contracts with social media.

Combine all that and you mix it up into a stew, and that's what you have right now, which is wildly entertaining, right? It fills so many different categories of entertainment. So for people to follow on social media or watch it on TV, whatever, you got superstars playing and you've got drama that happens on court. You have guys moving. But the reason it's happened is because the money now is so big that the top 10 guys can afford to just sign a one-on-one. Right. They don't need the security the long term.

They used to sign the five-year deal. Not anymore. It does feel a little generational to me, too. And when I did the podcast with Adam Silver, and he was talking about how he was worried about his players, that there was an unhappiness with his players because they're alone a lot and they're online a lot and things like that. And I don't know. Could that be part of just what we're

going to see going forward is these, this grass is always greener somewhere else kind of mentality. Cause like, you know, if, if we did this with our wives, we'd get married 10 times. Yeah. We'd all be divorced. Be like, oh, my wife was mean to me. And I don't know, maybe the neighbor started to look pretty good. But that's kind of what the MBA is becoming where it's like, oh, if you don't do right by me all the time, I might just leave. And this is really important because now you put it in the context of team building and the secret. Yeah. And the whole reason we're having this discussion is what makes great teams and historic teams. And is it going to be possible to really see the beauty of a basketball team

that's built something over five, six years and grown together? And now as a fan, you're attached, right? You're attached to this group. You've watched them grow. And it's like, oh, my God, this is our year. And then another heartbreak. And all right, we got it next year. We're going to do it.

And what if all that goes away and guys are just bouncing around and you don't end up with these, you know, team stories of the rise and fall of a team over five, seven years. It's just from one year to the next, it's like fantasy basketball. Yeah. But what scares me is I think people under 30 might just care about the player more than the team. This might not even be on the radar. Right. They're like, well, I don't care. I just want to follow LeBron. He's on the Lakers now. So maybe the Lakers are my new favorite team. So maybe the business will thrive regardless. I feel like it will. This is, it's like the daily fantasy Tinder era that we're in now, or it's just like swipe right. Katie's on Brooklyn now,

I guess I'm rooting for Brooklyn, but you know, I, what you lose is games like the game that you said was your favorite game. You ever coached game six at Houston. Yeah. That just doesn't happen anymore. That's the question.

And that's, and that's the important question, I think, because, you know, if this were art, you know, if, and it is basketball know, and it is, basketball is art. It's a form of art.

The art's getting worse, right? We're not reaching that, the peak of what the sport can offer. And if that happens and it just becomes about the tabloid headline, then we're not, it's not about the art anymore. You can listen to that entire podcast with Steve Kerr by subscribing right now on Apple, on Spotify, on Google Play, on Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts to Book of Basketball 2.0. That was from the second episode. It is called Steve Kerr on 25 years with the secret. So we put up four today. Next week, we have two more coming. It'll be pretty much two episodes a week straight for the next 14, 15 weeks.

Nephi Kyle is very excited for next week's episode. I won't tell you what that one's about, but you can subscribe right now. Hope you enjoy the podcast and we'll be back with a fresh new BS podcast on Thursday. Until then.