As long as Stephen Curry is on the Golden State Warriors, head coach Steve Kerr won’t be going anywhere.
“I will never leave Steph Curry,” Kerr matter-of-factly told Zena Keita of The Athletic Show.
In February 2024, the 60-year-old signed an extension with Golden State that carries him through the current season. Absent a new deal, his future in the Bay Area remains an ongoing subplot.
Unless Curry is retiring this summer, Kerr’s remark to Keita is pretty definitive as to his status past the 2025-26 campaign.
For his part, Curry was equally reticent in an October interview with ESPN’s Anthony Slater about the idea of playing for another head coach.
“I don’t want to,” he said. “We deserve that, I feel. Things change in this league. We can only control so much. But I think we’re in a very unique situation that we deserve the opportunity [to ride it out].”
The Warriors’ championship window may have closed already. They haven’t advanced past the Western Conference semifinals since their 2022 title run, and a 14-15 record is telling as to their present state. Acquiring Jimmy Butler ahead of the 2025 trade deadline hasn’t changed the organization’s general trajectory.
Even if Golden State isn’t going to be a championship contender, Kerr could prefer to walk away from the team at the same time Curry does. He was effusive in his praise of the two-time MVP, both as a player and as a person.
“He is one of the finest human beings I’ve ever been around in my life,” he told Keita. “And just to come to work every day and see Steph has made this job everything.”
Kerr also looked back fondly on the final of the 2024 Summer Olympics, when he coached the United States national team. Curry hit eight three-pointers in the gold medal game and went supernova down the home stretch to put France away.
“The thing that will stick with me forever is that LeBron [James] and Kevin [Durant] in that moment deferred to Steph,” Kerr said to Keita. “And it showed you their respect for him, and it also showed you the type of basketball players they are, how unselfish they are, because Steph had it going.
“They recognized it, and they weren’t running away from anything. They were saying, you take us home because you got it going and we trust you. … It was just beautiful to see how those three guys operated together.”
That was the first time Curry represented Team USA in the Summer Games, and the wait proved to be worth it.
Because of what they achieved together, Kerr and Curry will be forever linked in a way NBA coaches and players typically aren’t, especially with stars changing teams more frequently than ever. They have both earned the right to go out on their own terms.