All of the talk surrounding the Golden State Warriors lately has been about Stephen Curry and his knee injury. It was announced that he has a sprained MCL and will likely miss two weeks, which has Warriors fans holding their breath until he is able to come back.
On Tuesday, though, the Warriors got a bit of a break from the Curry news as their head coach Steve Kerr was named the NBA Coach of the Year. There was some dissension to this decision considering he missed a good chunk of the season with a back injury, but it's hard to argue when you consider he was the coach of the greatest regular season team in NBA history.
In Kerr's speech he unsurprisingly praised a lot of his players because he knows that he wouldn't have won the award without them, but one player specifically stood out, and that's Andre Iguodala. When Kerr first came to the Warriors, Iguodala was an All-Star and one of the best players in the league, but he moved him to a bench role, something he knew was a huge risk.
"My first real act as coach last year when I first came here, was putting Iguodala, who was an Olympian and an All-Star, putting him on the bench, and asking him to make that move," Kerr said. "There are a lot of NBA players who would not accept that. And Andre completely not only accepted it, but embraced it and became the leader of our younger group."
Iguodala's willingness to accept a bench role is basically a microcosm of this Warriors team as a whole, as they don't care how, they just want to win. Last season Iguodala came off the bench for the majority of the season, but he still played a huge role for the team. Kerr made an adjustment in the NBA Finals last season to start Iguodala against the Cleveland Cavaliers, and that made a huge difference in the Warriors winning the series as Iguodala went on to win Finals MVP.
With Curry out for the rest of the series against the Houston Rockets and possibly the entire second round series, Iguodala will be asked to step up again. He won't move into the starting lineup, Shaun Livingston has, but he will still likely take on a bigger role. When Curry went down in game four Iguodala stepped up, like he usually does, and scored a season-high 22 points on 9-for-11 shooting. You could see why Kerr was so quick to praise Iguodala when accepting the award as he does whatever it takes to make this Warriors team the best they can be.
