The coach of the Golden State Warriors let his players coach themselves last night. They won by 46 points.
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr officially won his 251st game on Monday — in a game he didn't coach.
The Warriors, despite their league-leading 44-13 record, have been going through something of a slump lately. They'd dropped three of their last six games before Monday night. So Kerr decided to shake things up and let his team do the coaching against the lowly Phoenix Suns, one of the league's worst teams.
The Warriors won 129-83. It was their second-biggest margin of victory all season.
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Reserve center JaVale McGee was tasked with running the team's preparatory film session. Cerebral veteran Andre Iguodala was given responsibility over the team's pregame shootaround. Throughout the course of the game, coaching duties were shared between Iguodala, 37-year-old center David West, star guard Stephen Curry, and the Warriors' brilliant and brash defensive star Draymond Green. Kerr hung out on the sidelines and remained uninvolved.
The Athletic's Anthony Slater noted that Green — who did not play because of a minor injury — eventually took the bulk of the coaching duties from his teammates and even cursed at star teammate Kevin Durant during a huddle while drawing up a play.
After the game, Kerr explained that he could only do so much as a coach: "It's [the players'] team and they have to take ownership of it. As coaches, our job is to nudge them in the right direction and guide them, but we don't control them."
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Kelly O'Meara Morales is a staff writer at The Week. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and studied Middle Eastern history and nonfiction writing amongst other esoteric subjects. When not compulsively checking Twitter, he writes and records music, subsists on tacos, and watches basketball.
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