Steve Kerr has a tendency to stay seated during times his Warriors team faces duress, a trait notably associated with Phil Jackson, whom Kerr played for while the Bulls enjoyed their second three-peat.
Those are teaching moments, to be sure, ones Kerr feels he has prepared his team for in practice and which they must learn to navigate on their own.
Extending the metaphor further, there's a wise-looking, older, bespectacled man sitting next to Kerr, one familiar to Bulls fans. Ron Adams isn't Tex Winter or Johnny Bach, Jackson's longtime trusted assistant coaches.
But like those two widely respected men, Adams, even at 70, is forever seeking unobtainable perfection, forever teaching. And perhaps best yet, forever learning.
"If you don't close your mind, you can learn and get better at any age," Adams said in a phone interview from Oakland, Calif. "You can look at the past to better your future. That's what happens when you get older."
Adams is in his fourth straight NBA Finals, which continue Sunday night with Game 2 and his Warriors having captured a wild opener at home. He perennially lands on the annual general managers' survey asking, among other topics, for the league's top assistant. And he carries strong enough relationships with past and current players to draw pregame hugs from Derrick Rose and news conference shout-outs from Kevin Durant.
Not surprisingly, he takes it all in stride.
"Without a doubt, these last few years have been some of my best learning years," Adams said. "First of all, you have Steve, who is an atypical coach. He started coaching at a later age. He had won championships as player, had been a general manager. He was coached by arguably two of the best coaches in the history of our game (in Jackson and Gregg Popovich). And he's brought to the program a very innovative way of looking at sport and a really good way of dealing with people and inspiring his players with really a minimal amount of language. He's a very measured person. He has a different philosophy.
"Hopefully, I've helped him. But he has helped me just as much."
Make no mistake, Adams has helped Kerr.
"Ron is a truth teller," Kerr said in an interview with the Tribune after hiring Adams. "I wanted somebody who wasn't afraid to say, 'You screwed that up.' We've had our dust-ups in a very productive way."
Adams, who grew up working on his family's farm near Fresno, Calif., has been coaching since 1969 and as an NBA assistant since 1992. He had two tours with the Bulls, one working for Scott Skiles in the Luol Deng-Ben Gordon-Kirk Hinrich era and one working for Tom Thibodeau as Rose ascended.
General manager Gar Forman chose not to renew Adams' contract in June 2013, a move that drew leaguewide attention, upset Thibodeau and cut Adams to his core. Bulls management believed Adams had been disparaging the organization to some of his colleagues around the league.
But this story isn't about that. In fact, Adams bared his soul regarding that incident in a startlingly candid interview with the Tribune in 2014, saying, "if the intent was to be hurtful to me and my family, it succeeded."
This story is about what has followed.
Brad Stevens made Adams his handpicked lead assistant hire when Stevens transitioned from coaching in college at Butler to coaching the Celtics. After one season with Stevens, Adams took the Golden State opportunity.
"You take some hard knocks in this business, like in Chicago, and you move on," Adams said. "It was great being with Brad. He's a marvelous coach, one of the best certainly in the world. And then being around Steve and this staff has been so wonderful. We have a lot of fun.
"Steve is a wonderful human being. I don't think I've been around anyone who understands a team better than he does. And he's done it much of the time not feeling his best, which is sad but also very impressive."
That's a reference to Kerr's well-chronicled back issues since a botched surgery. Adams, who will turn 71 early next season, tries to stave off his aches and pains with a steady diet of tennis and stretching. He said he wants to coach at least one more season and then will "figure it out."
"There are so many great coaches who put in yeoman's work. I'm happy to be mentioned in that group, especially never having served as a head coach," Adams said when asked about the annual GM poll. "But you have to take it in stride and look at the bigger picture. I'm fortunate. This has been a great way to end your career."
