Something wasn’t right. Jerry Stackhouse — a long-ago Sixer, long-time NBA player and now, at age 50, first-year assistant coach with the Golden State Warriors — wanted to get some shots up after a shootaround on a recent Saturday morning in the Wells Fargo Center.
The Dubs’ game against the Sixers was hours away, but most of the players lingered on the court. That included reserves Gary Payton II, Trayce Jackson-Davis, Gui Santos and Pat Spencer, who were launching three-pointers from the left corner, just in front of the visitors’ bench.
Stackhouse, 12 years removed from his 18-year playing career but still trim, very much wished to join them. But something was amiss. He couldn’t comfortably raise his arms. Strange.
After a few minutes of puzzlement somebody pointed out to him — gently, for Stack has never been a man to trifle with — that he was wearing his long-sleeved Black History Month T-shirt backwards.
He quickly corrected his wardrobe malfunction and began firing. Missed eight of his first 10 triples while alternating with the four players. But then he found his stroke, nailing eight in a row and 19 of his last 24 to beat the young bucks.
This is what Jerry Stackhouse does now: He makes minor tweaks in service of larger goals. As the Warriors’ defensive coordinator, he is not trying to reinvent the wheel. Nor should he do that, given the infrastructure and philosophy already in place. He is, however, trying to put his own stamp on a team that is hoping to delay the inevitable, hoping to make one more run in the Stephen Curry Era.
As he sat in a courtside seat after that shootaround Stackhouse echoed something the Dubs’ previous DC, Kenny Atkinson, said before heading off to become head coach of the rampaging Cavaliers — that a successful organization is “kind of just like finishing school,” in that it enables a newcomer to expand his knowledge base.
That being the case, Stackhouse said, “You just come in and fill things out.”
To a point that’s true. But strong franchises never stagnate, choosing instead to expose themselves to new ideas, new approaches. That’s why the Warriors this season added not only Stackhouse, who was fired last March after five seasons as Vanderbilt’s head coach, but Terry Stotts, who has been a head coach or assistant for six other NBA teams (and is in fact in his second go-round with Golden State, having served as an assistant under Mike Montgomery in 2004-05).
“Sometimes you need new blood on the roster,” head coach Steve Kerr told SI.com in November, “and sometimes you need it on the coaching staff. You need different voices. You need different experiences.”
Maybe they needed Stackhouse’s fire, too. As Jackson-Davis told one interviewer in November, “Stack is balls to the walls, 24-7.” He pushes and prods, and holds the players accountable through an intricate grading system that includes time-stamped videos showing their good and bad moments. He is also forever willing to step on the floor with his guys.
“I thank God I can go out there and show them so I don’t have to just tell them,” he said. “I can get out there and still be able to move and show them exactly what I want.”
In fact, he added, “If somebody asked me, I feel like I could go out there and play a game right now. But I wouldn’t be able to recover.”
Not in time for a subsequent game, whenever it might be. As Charles Barkley likes to say, Father Time is undefeated.
“Undefeated,” Stackhouse repeated.
On game nights he is just close enough to the action on the bench, overseeing an aspect of the game that was always Golden State’s secret sauce when it was winning four titles between 2015 and 2022. Yes, the offense was sublime. Yes, Curry or Klay Thompson or even (for a time) Kevin Durant were always poised for ignition.
But at their best, the Dubs guarded. That was true when the DC was Ron Adams, a Yoda-like figure who still serves as a team consultant. It was true under Mike Brown, who held the job for just a single season (‘21-22), albeit the one that saw Golden State win its most recent championship. And it was true under Atkinson/Chris DeMarco, who shared the job the last two years.
Stackhouse believes it can be true now, though it has had to be different. Gone are the days when the Warriors could trot out a switchable lineup featuring long, stringy defenders like Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livingston and Draymond Green. Of those, only Green remains, and for all his rough edges he remains remarkable on D, able to guard every position on the floor and put himself in the right spot at the right time.
“That guy’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer, from just what he does on the defensive side of the ball,” Stackhouse said. “He covers up so much. … Those four banners don’t hang up without him.”
But the Warriors are neither as rangy nor as versatile as they once were. To that end, Stackhouse has mandated less switching. He has implemented more zone. And he has been forced to adjust to an ever-changing cast. Golden State has started 34 different lineups this season, second-most in the league to the Sixers’ 36. Much of that has been due to injury, but far more recently, on Feb. 8, there was the acquisition of no less a player than Jimmy Butler from Miami.
Butler is a five-time All-Defensive selection, but at age 35 he is not the perimeter stopper he once was. No matter — Stackhouse uses him against bigger guys, and the rest of the pieces seem to have fallen into place … at both ends of the floor.
While winning 11 of 13 games since the Butler trade (through Saturday), the Warriors have been second in the league in offensive rating (119.9), second in defensive rating (108.2) and third in net rating (11.7). Overall they have jumped from the middle of the pack in defensive rating to eighth. They were 15th a year ago.
Stackhouse has been enthused about the steadiness not only of Green but Payton — and defensive excellence unquestionably runs in that family — as well as the improvement of players like Brandin Podziemski and Moses Moody. But certainly he has played his part. Certainly his grading system (among other things) has impacted the players.
“They’re competitive,” he said. “They take it serious. They don’t want to see those negatives.”
They are well aware he played; his on-court career overlapped, in fact, with those of Curry and Green. What they might not know are some of the particulars. How the Sixers made him the No. 3 pick of the 1995 draft, out of North Carolina, but traded him a little over two years later to Detroit. It’s not that he wasn’t productive — he averaged nearly 20 points a game in his 175 games as a Sixer — but it became clear that the on-court fit with Allen Iverson, the No. 1 pick in ‘96, was far from ideal.
Stackhouse made a pair of All-Star appearances while a Piston, one amid a season that saw him put up nearly 30 points a game. In all he played for eight teams over his 18 seasons and scored 17 a night. Also gained renown as a tough guy who didn’t mind resolving disagreements with his fists. In the course of his career he scrapped with not only Jeff Hornacek, Christian Laettner and Kirk Snyder but also Iverson, when they were Sixers teammates. And it came after practice, so insert punchline here.
Stackhouse once famously labelled the latter bout as “a fight between one guy who didn’t know how to fight and another guy who didn’t want to fight” — i.e., AI and himself, respectively. He also called Iverson “my guy” when I spoke with him amid his final season (‘12-13), with Brooklyn. So no hard feelings, apparently.
When asked if the current Warriors are aware he wasn’t one to be messed with when he played Stackhouse said, “I think they got YouTube, so they know that.” But, he added, “I’ve mellowed in my elder years.”
Well, some. Presumably he handed out more than a few tough grades after the Warriors dropped that recent game to the Sixers, 126-119. With Butler sidelined by back spasms, Golden State allowed Quentin Grimes to get loose for a career-high 44 points, and down the stretch there were repeated defensive missteps. A faulty rotation that led to a Paul George three-pointer. An illegal-defense call against Green that resulted in a four-point possession for the Sixers. A Green foul on a Grimes triple attempt that led to a free throw and a George jumper.
Two nights later in Madison Square Garden the Dubs returned to form, holding the Knicks scoreless for four fourth-quarter minutes in a come-from-behind 114-102 victory. And two nights after that they erased an early 27-5 deficit to beat Brooklyn. They are now sixth in the West, and if this keeps up it seems safe to assume that Stackhouse’s star will ascend as well.
He makes no secret of the fact that he would like to be a head coach again, particularly in the NBA. But it has to be for a team that has an “ideal blend” of young and old players, he said — of guys “wanting to win now, but still having young talent that you need to develop.”
The first order of business, though, is taking this season as far as possible. And given this recent stretch, he has begun thinking that can be very far indeed. During a victory in Orlando, for example, he watched as Butler hustled to contest a shooter attempting a corner three. It was an extraordinary effort, Stackhouse thought, the kind of thing you don’t see every night.
“I was like, ‘Man, we got a chance to be really good,’” he said.
It might be true that he is in finishing school now. But often in recent years Golden State has had only one sort of finish in mind. Stackhouse, caught up in that, needs only to continue making his tweaks, in service of larger goals. Goodness knows there are worse jobs.