“A broken Home” Golden State Warriors head Coach wife has ….

If you are for some strange reason a fan of whiplash, then the 2021-22 Golden State Warriors were just the thing for you. After a blistering 18-2 start that put the league on notice, it’s been essentially all bad news, save for the cathartic if clunky return of Klay Thompson and the occasional rousing bounce-back game over a good team after losing five out of six games.

The Warriors are perhaps who we thought they were before the season began: a playoff team with a fading championship pedigree, straddling multiple eras, that is simply no longer feared. They are now the team you want to match up with in the playoffs. They are now a team anyone can “punk,” as Draymond Green aptly put it.

Zeroing in on the culprits for the dysfunction of the post-Durant Era isn’t exactly a job for Hercule Poirot, though there is no shortage of likely candidates. Every tip of the spear should take its share of the blame for an on-court product tumbling to the finish line: front office, coach, players.

The front office’s refusal to use the mid-level exception or test the buy-out market, instead gambling that Kevon Looney’s body could withstand 82 games on a big-man island, doesn’t sit well in retrospect. Stephen Curry, Green and Thompson have all (understandably!) fallen off in various ways. Injuries, many wits insist, are the great leveler. All this is true.

But the Scapegoat Buck has to stop somewhere, and fairly or not, the individual best poised for accountability is the casually beloved middleman, aka Steve Kerr. The Warriors should be at least open to the possibility of something many would have considered unthinkable at the start of the season: moving on from the coach that led a once atrophying franchise to three NBA titles.

“A broken Home” Golden State Warriors head Coach wife has ….

To address the elephants in the room holding guns to my head, this column is not calling for Steve Kerr’s immediate dismissal for crimes against humanity (I already wrote that column about these guys).

I like Steve Kerr and generally, I think most people in the world do, too. He’s proven himself as a good coach, especially in the playoffs. And hey, it’s not as if we’re talking about an end result of a regular season akin to the 2012 Charlotte Bobcats! No, this disappointing, occasionally agonizing season is in fact another 50-win campaign in which Golden State, without Curry, Thompson and Green for long stretches of the year, has secured homecourt in the playoffs for at least the first round. We’ve absolutely been spoiled by our recent past. But despite Joe Lacob’s possible thoughts to the contrary, there is no such thing as Golden State Exceptionalism.

Teams go up, they go down, they go diagonal. Still, their record, on paper, is irrelevant to the lackadaisical, seemingly confused and rudderless performances that increasingly became not the exception, but the rule. The Warriors look like a complacent team, and complacent teams are not dangerous. Complacent teams are targets.

I imagine it’s a bit of a hard sell for many people to even consider moving on from Steve Kerr. It probably sounds ludicrous to a broad swath of the fan base, and surely to outsiders as well.

He’s been a historically successful NBA coach. He won three championships in his first five years of coaching! That’s very good, I think. Going even further, when the Kerr Warriors have actually made the playoffs, they’ve never (yet) failed to reach the Finals.

That is something to hang one’s Lincoln Project hat on for all time. Is Kerr a top 15 coach of all time? Who cares? He was the exact right coach for the moment, a moment he seized by the throat. Kerr (with a little assist from David Lee’s injury) turned a good team into a great team, into a champion.

He was a coach that realized all of Don Nelson’s chaotic fever dreams with a more moderate respectable sheen. Beyond the on-court dominance, he’s just an exceptionally good fit culturally for the Bay Area.

He’s a thoughtful, measured, somewhat squishy Resistance Liberal, who genuinely seems kind and decent. Most importantly, he’s accepted blame for the sin of trading Shawn Marion for a tired Shaquille O’Neal back in his general manager days.

This isn’t so much of a case of the emperor having no clothes — merely that the emperor is wearing the wrong outfit for the occasion.