Steve Kerr isn’t wasting any time at Warriors camp. After just the second day of training camp, the Golden State coach said Stephen Curry and Draymond Green are already being pushed into new territory, with the staff asking them to adjust to a different way of playing.
“Different spacing, different cutting. They’re used to doing something different, and we’re going to ask them to do something new. Both guys today, a couple times, like, their heads were kinda spinning,” Steve Kerr said when asked how Curry and Green are responding to his different teaching style in camp.
Kerr said that reaction is part of the process, not a problem.
“And I told Draymond, ‘Don’t worry about it; this is what it’s supposed to look like in the first couple of days of camp when you’re supposed to feel something.”
He added that the same thing happened when the Warriors were working with their young players in the Summer League.
“When we were working on this stuff with our young players in the Summer League, they had the same reaction; they were also getting confused the first couple of days. That’s the whole point of camp, the whole point of continuing to drill stuff before it becomes routine,” Kerr explained.
A big reason for the new look on the coaching side is Frank Vogel, who joined the staff this summer and is handling the defense. Kerr said the Warriors have been borrowing from Vogel’s methods, including transition defense work and rebounding drills.
“Frank is running the defense obviously, so we’re using some of his transition defensive drills, some of his rebounding drills. We’ve been watching tape of Dallas’ training camp from last year, the drill work that Frank did with them.”
Kerr also revealed Vogel put a stop to that film study after enough was on hand.
“Frank said, ‘No more Dallas tape after today’ because guys don’t like watching other teams, so now we have enough tape for our shelves to watch our own camp tape, but Frank is awesome.”
The praise didn’t stop there. Kerr called Vogel “a great, great coach” and said he has already done a strong job organizing the group, setting expectations for defense and teaching terminology.
“He’s a great, great coach, and he’s doing a really good job getting these guys organized, giving them kind of the expectations for how we’re going to defend, our terminology, and I’m very confident we’re going to have a good defense,” Kerr concluded on Vogel.
The other major camp storyline is the starting lineup. Kerr said that outside of Curry and Green, the remaining three spots are still open, and the competition will continue through camp and into the start of the regular season.
Young players such as Gui Santos and Brandin Podziemski are still in the mix, but nothing has been settled yet.
With the camp just getting going, the Warriors are already testing veterans with new ideas while sorting out the roster around them. Curry and Green are adapting to fresh spacing and cutting concepts, Vogel is putting his stamp on the defense, and the battle for the final starting jobs remains wide open.
Kerr said the coming weeks will matter as the system keeps taking shape and the competition for roles heats up, with Jimmy Butler and Moses Moody expected back in the second half.
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