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Seven days earlier, Steve Kerr had stood in a Phoenix locker room telling his players they had just played one of the most incredible games he had ever seen them play, after a comeback win over the Clippers kept the Warriors’ season alive. A week later, in the same city, the season was over, and the speech was different. Not a locker room speech. Six words on a sideline, caught on a microphone, to the two men who defined his journey.
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As the final seconds of Golden State’s 111-96 play-in loss to the Phoenix Suns ticked away on Friday night, Warriors head coach Steve Kerr pulled Stephen Curry and Draymond Green into a sideline huddle. NBA on Prime Video’s microphones caught what followed. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I love you guys to death. Thank you. Appreciate you.”
The footage was broadcast nationally, and when it landed on the Prime Video desk, it landed hard enough to move Dirk Nowitzki to tears.
“Sweet. Emotional. They had a heck of a run… The bond you form over all those years, and knowing that you’re like a family,” Nowitzki said after the game on NBA on Prime. “This makes me choke up a little bit. It was a cool moment…Kerr is a class act.”
DIRK TEARED UP: Dirk Nowitzki was brought to tears & got choked up when seeing Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr thank Stephen Curry & Draymond Green in Kerr’s potential final game 😢❤️
Kerr: “I don’t know what happens next, but, I love you guys to death. Thank you.… pic.twitter.com/B15vMzZvyz
— Courtside Buzz (@CourtsideBuzzX) April 18, 2026
The fact that a two-time NBA champion and four-time Finals MVP reacted with visible emotion to a sideline embrace says something about the weight of the incident.
The huddle carried the specific gravity of a moment that nobody fully planned. Kerr is in the final year of his contract and has not committed to returning. When reporters pressed him after the game about the specific words exchanged with Curry and Green, his response was characteristically deflective: “None of your business.”
He acknowledged that the broadcast had already caught it. He did not want to make it bigger than it was. He also could not stop it from being exactly that. Curry, asked about Kerr’s future after the game, framed it without any attempt to lobby for an outcome. “I want coach to be happy. I want him to be excited about the job. I want him to believe he’s the right guy for the job.”
The practical uncertainty is real. Kerr said he would take a week or two before sitting down with owner Joe Lacob and general manager Mike Dunleavy to figure out what comes next. “I still love coaching, but I get it,” he said. “These jobs all have an expiration date. There’s a run that happens, and sometimes it’s time for new blood and new ideas and all that. If that’s the case, then I will be nothing but grateful.” He added one line that closed the door on one specific scenario, regardless of what the Warriors decide: “I don’t want to walk away from Steph.”
The offseason decisions surrounding the moment are equally open. Green holds a $27.6 million player option for 2026-27 and has not confirmed he’ll pick it up. Curry confirmed he has “multiple years” left and wants an extension. Furthermore, with Golden State missing the playoffs for the second time in three seasons and Jimmy Butler rehabbing a torn ACL, the franchise faces genuine decisions about whether to push one more time with the championship core or begin reshaping around a new timeline.
Nowitzki’s Reaction Was the Appropriate One for What Was Actually Happening
What Dirk Nowitzki saw on that Prime Video desk was not a routine post-elimination embrace. It was Steve Kerr, the fourth-winningest coach in NBA history, standing on a court in Phoenix with the two players he spent twelve years building something extraordinary with, and not knowing whether he would be their coach next season.
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He said the most honest thing he could say at that moment and then deflected every attempt by reporters to make it a public event. Nowitzki did not choke up because of sentiment alone. He choked up because he is a former champion who understands what that kind of bond between a coach and a player actually costs to build. It is the shared losses before the shared championships, the confrontations and apologies, the seasons where the result was not the relationship.
Kerr, Curry, and Green have four rings and twelve years of that specific texture between them. When Kerr said “I don’t know what’s going to happen next” on that sideline, he described something genuine and immediate. He was not performing for the broadcast; he was telling two people the plain truth.
