OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Steve Kerr will find a stretch while coaching next month’s All-Star Game to get all four of his Golden State Warriors on the floor together.
“I am absolutely going to play them all four together,” Kerr said Friday. “Those four will be together for sure. I can guarantee you that’ll happen at some point because that will be a pretty cool thing. It’s very rare. … It’ll be fun at least for a couple minutes I’ll get them all out there at once.”
And center Zaza Pachulia will be with them in spirit for the Feb. 19 game in New Orleans.
The Warriors tied an NBA record with four players on the All-Star team - two-time reigning MVP Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant as starters for the Western Conference coached by Kerr, and Draymond Green and Klay Thompson as reserves.
“That’ll be really cool,” Thompson said of playing with his three Warriors teammates in the NBA’s midseason showcase. “I wonder who the fifth player will be. That will be really awesome. It will feel like a real game and we can even run some sets. It’s crazy. It’s really a unique situation and it doesn’t happen a lot for a lot of teams, so we’re going to enjoy the heck out of it.”
Only seven other teams, in fact.
Golden State, with the NBA’s best record at 39-7, is just the eighth franchise to land four players in the All-Star game and just the second in the West. The Los Angeles Lakers did so in 1998.
“That’s special,” Green said. “It says a lot about this team. First off the success that we’ve had here.”
In honoring the lone Golden State starter not there - Pachulia - Thompson has a plan in mind.
“I might set a hard screen or something,” he said.
Oh, and Green has his own idea: “We’ll all take Fatheads for Zaza, extra-large size.”
Green found out about making the team while taking care of his 1-month-old son, Draymond Jr., on Thursday - he was on feeding and diaper duty and the baby was “crying a lot.”
“My first 35 minutes was hell finding out I was an All-Star,” he said. “After that … he ate, I started burping him and he fell asleep, so I started responding to texts and he woke up like 10 minutes later and went crazy again. It was a cool couple hours for me, dealing with crying and diapers, milk. It was fun.”
Kerr and the Golden State staff will coach their second All-Star game in three seasons, and with so many familiar faces.
“It’s a great honor for those guys individually and for us as an organization,” Kerr said. “It’s pretty remarkable to have this group together right now and to see them all playing so well together, along with the rest of our guys. It doesn’t always work that way, where you put a group together, a group of stars, it doesn’t always click. But it’s clicked because our guys are unselfish and they enjoy playing with one another.”
Notes: Reserve F David West, who suffered a non-displaced fracture of his left thumb Jan. 18 against Oklahoma City, is doing some running and shooting. He will be re-evaluated at the two-week mark early next week with a follow-up X-ray. “The main thing is he can’t have contact,” Kerr said. “So he’s able to actually get some work done on the floor but the fracture has to heal, so any non-contact stuff he’s able to do, which is good.”
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