OAKLAND — Steve Kerr was just a rookie head coach trying to make an impression on his new team when he pulled them together for their first training camp to show a video.
He’d put some work into it. He’d written a script and the former TNT colour man tapped Marv Albert, his old broadcast partner, to do the voiceover.
Kerr even embedded a catch phrase that he was hoping would be a touchstone for the team and the way he wanted them to play.
And thus the Golden State Warriors‘ “Strength in Numbers” mantra was born.
"Oh, can you imagine Marv saying ‘Strength in Numbers’? ‘Strength in Numbers!’," said Kerr on Friday, doing a so-so impression of the iconic Albert’s legendary Brooklyn accent. "It sounds way more dramatic when Marv says it."
It didn’t go over all that well initially. Like any group of professionals, basketball players have a strong “show me” streak.
"I thought it was corny when he first said it. Like ‘Strength in Numbers,’ that’s corny," said Warriors all-star do-everything Draymond Green. "But when he started to speak on it and say what he meant by it, and then at that point we still don’t really understand it. But then you really get to playing and you kind of see what he means, then all of it comes together, and it’s like, ‘Wow, that makes a lot of sense.’”
"But it was one of those things at first where you’re like, ‘Huh? You want this to be our motto?’ Like, we don’t like that."
Kerr says the motto was born out of experience and out of necessity. As a bench player on four championship teams in Chicago, he recognized the need for broad contributions from the entire roster.
"I think there’s something powerful about everybody playing," he said. "I learned that from Phil Jackson. If you remember in kind of the early days, early ’90s when the Bulls started winning titles, had a lot of guys who would come off the bench and fans were like what is [this]."
“The one that jumps out at me is they were down like 15 to Portland at home and he had Bobby Hansen and Stacey King, and B.J. Armstrong on the floor, and I think Michael and Scottie were both out. Maybe Scottie was on the floor. Scottie was on the floor? Yeah. But those were great lessons for me too. Because when guys are vested, there’s a strength that comes through that and a unity. And they’re in the NBA for a reason. Everybody on every roster in the NBA is a hell of a basketball player.”
“So it’s fun to use a lot of different people, and it’s great to see guys invested and emotionally involved."
It’s an approach that only made sense when he inherited a very good Warriors team — they’d been in the playoffs for two straight years and won 51 games the year before under Mark Jackson. But in figuring out how to make them a championship-calibre club, Kerr wanted them to play at a higher and more intense tempo while accepting a broader range of roles.
"I looked at the roster, and we had so many guys who can play. It seemed obvious that if we played 10, 11 people every night at a high level for shorter minutes that we could wear people down," said Kerr. "So I think what happened was I put together a video to show the team on the eve of training camp, our first year, and I wanted kind of them to get a feel for who we are as a staff. So there was some humour involved and some clips from movies, and I had Marv Albert narrate it. So we worked pretty hard on this thing."
It didn’t take long for the buy-in to take place. The Warriors went from a team that passed the ball less than any other in the league to one of the best ball-moving clubs in the NBA. They improved from 51 wins to 67 and they did it while giving 12 players at least 11 minutes a game and no single player more than 33 minutes.
As the Warriors became the NBA’s best team, “Strength in Numbers” became more than a saying the players were buying into, it became the rallying cry for the entire organization. Billboards across the Bay Area carry the phrase; it’s captured on posters on the side of Oracle Arena in letters two stories high.
Does Kerr regret not trademarking the phrase, the way former Los Angeles Lakers head coach Pat Riley did with “Threepeat” after his teams won consecutive titles in 1987 and 1988, charging an estimated five-to-10 per cent royalty rate when the Chicago Bulls used it in the 1990s?
"Well, the inspiration was not financially motivated," joked Kerr. "Or I would have trademarked it before the team stole it from me."
The payoff has never been richer than it was in Game 1 of the NBA Finals. With the Warriors high-scoring backcourt of Steph Curry and Klay Thompson strangely off — they were held to a career-low 20 points combined, compared with the 52 points per game they averaged in the regular season — the Warriors were lifted by their bench players, who outscored their Cleveland counterparts 45-10, led by Shaun Livingston and Leandro Barbosa’s combined 31 points on 15 shots.
"I think we cannot relax when those guys make their subs," said LeBron James. "Livingston, Barbosa, [Andre] Iguodala, those guys came into the game and they changed the tempo and they play with as much confidence as Steph and Klay and Draymond. And we have to understand that. We have to treat those guys, like I said, like all-stars."
Even Green has been sold.
"When you start to see all the stuff work and you start to see what it really means and you hear what it really means, and then like, obviously last night wasn’t the first night, but a night like last night and you’re like, wow, ‘Strength in Numbers,’ all right," says Green. "That makes a lot of sense now."
"So it’s definitely something that we live by, that we try to always be conscious of, because I think the strength in our team is the numbers. It is the depth. It’s the camaraderie. It’s all of us as one. It’s not all of us as a bunch of individuals. So it makes a lot of sense in this and it’s very fitting for this team."
It creates some unusual circumstances. As the Warriors rolled to a record-setting 73-win season, Curry put up some staggering numbers — his 30.1 points per game led the league, his 402 made threes shattered his own NBA record and he became just the third player in NBA history to shoot 50 per cent from the floor, 45 per cent from three and 90 per cent from the line — on his way to becoming the NBA’s first unanimous MVP selection.
But that he did it all in 34 minutes a game might be the most amazing statistic of all. Klay Thompson averaged a career-high 22 points in just 33 minutes.
In Game 1, the game-changing 21-4 run came at the end of the third quarter and the end of the fourth while the Warriors’ all-star backcourt were on the bench. They didn’t return until there were just five minutes left in the game and the outcome was pretty much decided.
"There have been times where I’ve kind of given [Kerr] the look because I’m a competitor and I want to go out there and play," said Curry. "But that’s just me being selfish at that point trying to get back out there. You understand that with the talent that we have on the bench, when they’re out there playing like they did last night, I mean, why stop the momentum? Why get in the way of that? "
"There’s going to be a time when I get back out on the floor, me, Klay, whoever is in position usually to close out games, we can get out there and still have an impact on it. But all year we’ve relied on our depth. The minutes that we logged in the regular season is because of how well our bench can obviously protect leads but also build them like they did last night."
"So it’s fun to kind of see them bring the energy and do what they do."
Strength in Numbers: It may sound corny at first, but much better in Marv Albert’s voice and best of all when it shifts from theory to practice.