WHAT’S a rookie head coach doing in the NBA Finals starting on June 4?
That’s a perfect question to ask Steve Kerr, who is well on his way to becoming the first main mentor of the novice kind since the great Patrick Riley to win the coveted Larry O’Brien trophy.
Riley did it in 1982 with the “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers of Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and company.
Kerr’s Golden State Warriors used a 104-90 victory in Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals to knock off the Houston Rockets and punch their ticket to the NBA Finals for the first time in 40 years.
The Warriors will open the best-of-seven championship series next Thursday at home at the Oracle Arena against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
In the afterglow of his team’s triumph, the 49-year-old Kerr would likely tell you he will coach in the Finals because he is not actually a greenhorn in the NBA.
Before getting hired to replace the popular Mark Jackson in Oakland last year, Steve sat beside Marv Alpert for eight years analyzing basketball games for the Turner Network Television.
Of course, as an NBA player for 14 years, he had his share of X and Os to follow. At one time, he was the league’s premier three-point shooter.
Kerr earned five NBA rings while playing for Chicago and the San Antonio Spurs. After his tour of duty for four teams, he became president and general manager of the Phoenix Suns, the team that drafted him out of college (University of Arizona) in 1988.
Last Wednesday night, Al Attles, now 78, received the Western Conference championship trophy from ESPN’s Doris Burke and then quickly got it to superstar Stephen Curry, who in turn handed it to the rest of his Golden State teammates.
A revered figure in the San Francisco Bay Area, Attles coached the Rick Barry-led Warriors to the 1975 NBA title over the heavily favored Washington Bullets.
The onus is now on Kerr to bring home the NBA trophy after 40 years.
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Former chief national sports statistician Joseph Dumuk says the prediction about our gold medal harvest in the Southeast Asian Games in Singapore next month could be pie-in-the-sky.
Julian Camacho, the country’s chef de mission to the 28th SEA Game, says our 466 athletes are looking at 50 to 55 golds for a fifth-place finish overall.
After doing the maths, Dumuk says in the last four SEA Games, the country has had a share of 8 gold medals for every 100 awarded.
Dumuk explains that with 402 golds at stake in Singapore, we could capture—using the averages—32 golds and battle for sixth place.
Since we won the overall crown in 2005, our highest rank had been fifth and the lowest seventh, says Dumuk.
We were sixth with 41 golds in 2007, fifth with 38 golds in 2009, sixth with 36 gold in 2011 and seventh with 29 golds in 2013. Averaging would peg us at sixth place in Singapore.
But no matter how you slice it, our athletes have been mired in mediocrity even in the SEA Games—which is more of a regional picnic than a sports meet to prepare qualifiers to the Asian Games and the Olympics.