The Coaching Styles that Define Warriors Basketball

Steve Kerr’s won three championships now with the Warriors, and could possibly lead them to more. But Kerr, while he’s a great basketball mind, had to learn it from somewhere. His obvious experience under Phil Jackson while he was with Michael Jordan and the Bulls is a good starting point, but there’s another coach he learned a lot from while winning a championship under, and he’s still around the league.

Gregg Popovich is one of the most accomplished coaches in basketball history. He’s coming close to Don Nelson’s all-time regular season wins records, and figures to hit the mark before he retired. A little-known fact about Pop, however, is that he was an assistant for Nelly back from 1992 to 1994.

Don Nelson, the head coach of both the Run TMC and We Believe eras of Warriors basketball, is often credited for building the blueprint that teams like today’s Warriors use: A run-and-gun, transition-heavy style which was refined by Mike D’Antoni’s Suns and essentially perfected by Kerr in 2014-2015 in his first stint as a head coach.

“Nelly Ball”, as pundits christened it back in the day, has its imprints all over the modern game, but while Nelson was a great basketball mind, he didn’t bring any of those Warriors teams to a title. His disciple, Gregg Popovich, did. Implementing his own defense-oriented, disciplined style of Nelson’s transition attack, Popovich took his system and made it work for Tim Duncan, an all-time talent, while giving guys like Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili a stage to become the players they’re recognized as today.

Popovich, a five-time champion in San Antonio, coached Steve Kerr in the Spurs’ 2002-2003 seasons in the twilight of his career. Kerr, as any smart guy would, took a lot of notes from Pop: The Warriors have boasted some of the top defenses in the league (#1 this season by a large margin in defensive rating) with his squads, while still maintaining high-octane offenses that play to his players’ strengths.

The modern iteration of Nelly Ball is a combination of Nelson’s influence on Popovich, and Pop’s influence on Kerr. The Warriors have taken the styles that D’Antoni could only tweak and turned it into a championship-winning scheme, largely because of the influence on the culture that West Coast basketball has from his predecessors and mentors.

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