
Luke Walton had a routine when he was an assistant coach in the grand old days of November and January and March and June. Just before game time, as the other members of the Golden State coaching staff would walk out onto the floor before the National Anthem, he would stay behind, take a fast shower, then take the floor just as the anthem was ending.
Not Tuesday, though. There was a banner to raise, and a ring to obtain, and lots more eyes on him than ever in his already fame-splashed life. There would be no dispensation to go missing before his biggest moment yet. He had to be the boss without that fresh and fragrant feeling a new boss should always have.
Still, he looked properly composed as he stood in line with the other Warriors coaches as they received their diamond-encrusted goods. Steve Kerr, the man he is temporarily replacing, Alvin Gentry, the man he was charged with defeating in the Warriors’ home opener, Ron Adams, Bruce Fraser and Jarron Collins.
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He didn’t smile or wave or do anything to suggest to the crowd that he was anything other than a member of the staff. The crowd knew different. They roared their love for Kerr, but they shouted their tolerance and forbearance for Walton.
They surely felt he'd need it, even though unlike so many interim coaches of bygone days, he had Stephen Curry.
But he also had these pearls from Kerr right before he took the floor: “We won 67 games last year, and I didn’t know what I was doing at all.”
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It is remarkable, then, that the only team ever to have three consecutive head coaches with zero games of coaching experience on any level could send out the third and operate with confidence and self-knowledge. If nothing else, we learned from Golden State’s 111-95 victory over Gentry’s New Orleans Pelicans that the coaching conundrum will not be an adequate excuse if things get weird.
Walton has a ridiculously complicated job in some ways, as proven by the fact that Kerr spoke briefly to the team at halftime and stayed backstage to offer bits of wisdom as any standard workaholic who can’t entirely not be the boss even when he’s delegated a temporary new boss. Walton must seem like a head coach without becoming Alexander (“I’m in charge here”) Haig. He must make changes that may offend the players to whom he served as support a year ago. He has to tell Draymond Green not to yell at the officials (too late -– Derrick Collins got him on Tuesday) and he has to take Harrison Barnes out of a game in which he shot horrifically, all without seeming like the ambitious vice principal.
He has to defer while leading, and lead without pushing. And he knows that having redefined himself for the moment, he must redefine himself again when Kerr returns from his headache-and-fatigue spells caused by a not-entirely-successful back surgery.
And Tuesday, he had to do it with his father in the room. It’s a wonder he didn’t have Bill nail-gunned to his chair so he wouldn’t walk into the huddle and pronounce a few defensive alterations.
“It was pretty hectic before the game,” Walton said. “Everything was going a million miles an hour -- the ring ceremony, my dad in the building, everything.”
Put another way, there was no time for a soothing pregame shower -– not even a wet-wipe. He was on display now, and the stakes for are higher, even if only temporarily so.
There was the standard pregame/post-title pyro-spectacular with hubcap-sized jeweled accessories, one made more bearable by the continued recognition by owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber that they can enjoy their moment without telling others about it.
Then there was Round 1 of the Curry Apology-Fest Tour, in which he apologized to the crippled Pelicans for raining down 40 points upon them in three quarters as though he was making two highlight films in one.
[RELATED: Instant Replay: Curry, Warriors crush Pelicans in opener]
And, as everyone in the building expected, there were the Pels ('Cans?) –- led by Kendrick Perkins, Dante Cunningham and Ish Smith, and ruined by one of Anthony Davis’ worst games ever.
But more than anything else, there was Walton, standing most of the time near midcourt with his right hand on his hip and his left arm hanging from his side, like someone who couldn’t decide whether to look like a bored runway model or someone who thought he might need the other hip later in the game.
As time went on and Curry et. al. (Andrew Bogut, Festus Ezeli and Shaun Livingston, for the most part) established their dominant posture, Walton relaxed more. But you could tell he’d given his first night in the big chair more thought than would make him comfortable. He handled the tactical business without much of a glitch (at least as much as a basketball coach can have at this level), but he looked early on like he was standing outside himself to see if he looked like what he figured a head coach should look like. He got over that soon enough, but you could tell something was missing.
A nice bracing pregame shower that ended with "and the home of the brave."