Steve Kerr Explained How Last Year With The Warriors Felt A Lot Like 1998 With The Bulls

The Golden State Warriors will look very different in 2019-20, not just because they have new uniforms and are playing in a new arena in a new city, but they also have a very different roster with just six returners off last year’s Finals squad.

The Kevin Durant era ended after three years and two championships, with Durant suffering an Achilles tear in this year’s Finals loss to the Raptors. The star forward chose to go to Brooklyn to join Kyrie Irving on the Nets and the Warriors now re-tool around Steph Curry, Draymond Green, and Klay Thompson, who is rehabbing a torn ACL currently. Durant’s move to the Big Apple comes as little surprise to most, as there was a near consensus throughout last season that he was leaving the Warriors and going to New York this summer, although the initial expectation was he’d join the Knicks.

That feeling that Durant’s departure was inevitable wasn’t just on the outside, as Steve Kerr explained on the Full 48 pod with Howard Beck recently. Kerr likened last year with the Warriors to the feeling of exhaustion and that it was the end of a run that he felt on the Bulls in 1998, the last year of their second three-peat.

“I think the beauty of basketball is that every team has this life force within it and you can see it — it’s why I loved watching Brooklyn this year, they had this great energy about them,” Kerr said. “The difficult thing, whether it’s today or 25 years ago when I was playing for the Bulls, is to try and sustain it, because it takes so much energy, both physically and emotionally, to stay on top year after year after year. I would frequently relate back to my Bulls days, 1998 the last year of the three-peat, that team was running on fumes by the end. We beat Utah on the famous Michael Jordan shot where he pushed off on Bryon Russell, all that stuff. That team was just running out of gas. That’s how it felt for us this year.

“It was exhausting and we were running out of gas, and I think that’s just kind of inevitable,” Kerr continued. “The hardest thing I think for fans to truly understand is the amount of effort and energy it takes to do this year in and year out when you have 29 other teams coming after you with fresh energy. When you’re on the climb in this league, you can play every night and you can’t wait for the next game. When you’ve been in the Finals four straight years, it’s like, ‘Oh my god we have another game tonight?’ … To me, we were just exhausted last year, and we still had a shot. We were right there. So, ultimately, I’m incredibly proud of the guys and I could probably without hyperbole say that I’ve never been prouder of the team than I was after the Toronto series.”

Kerr lauded Durant and everything he brought to the Warriors, saying they wouldn’t have won two more titles without him, but noted that things simply felt like they had run their course. He also discussed his excitement for this season because they have a new challenge with a new-look roster and the chance to try new things and begin a climb again, rather than sitting perched atop the league trying to fight everyone else off.

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