Kerr full of hope headed to Warriors camp

OAKLAND — Steve Kerr arrives on the Warriors sidelines stocked with a rich basketball resume.

Five NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls and San Antonio Spurs. A wealth of knowledge from legends Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich over his 15-year playing career. Front-office knowledge from his time spent as general manager in Phoenix. Years of time as a TV analyst close to the action.

But Kerr’s experience as a head coach?

Basically zero.

With Kerr is Alvin Gentry, with his own coaching resume, including as head coach in Phoenix when Kerr was GM.

With all the knowledge, experience and influences from different eras and styles, it won’t be easy to pinpoint what type of coach Kerr will be, or what his system will look like.

Kerr said he will take from all of his experiences to fuse together some sort of style, and that the fusion will take time and patience:

“Our job as coaches is to try to blend all of this. We have a lot of ideas, but we have to figure out what works, what fits our players, and sort of condense it into our style and our system. That takes time and we’ll have to grow into it.”

One thing is certain Kerr said: A focus on moving the ball.

Kerr said he wants to push the pace of the game so the ball gets out in front and forces the defense to react. Kerr said ball movement gives the team the best chance to make multiple rotations and break down defenses.

Other than that, everything is up in the air. Even Kerr himself is hopping on the hope bandwagon:

“Well hopefully it works right? We’ve been up there (in his office) plotting and scheming … but in the end it has to work on the floor.”

Media heard a lot of “we’ll see” and “I don’t know” Thursday, but that’s not any reason to doubt Kerr just yet.  He’s absolutely right. Things take time, and he hasn’t even had a chance to see the team play together under his regime.

Surely by the end of the preseason, some of the question marks will be gone. But because of how basketball works, not every thing happens as planned.

It won’t be perfect, but Kerr is up to the challenge and plans on using every minute of training camp and preseason to figure out the intricacies:

“The way I approach it is the exhibition games are just an extension of camp and we really do have a month before it counts. So I’m not concerned with winning preseason games, I want to use those games as test runs and we can try different combinations and give other guys more minutes than they might get otherwise to see how they do. It’ll all just be part of the entire training camp.”

Warriors training camp opens Tuesday in Oakland with the preseason rebooting Oct. 7 against the Los Angeles Clippers at Staples Center in Los Angeles.

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