He would take the grease board back to his suite at the Bellagio and practice drawing up plays, literally practice getting faster at scribbling sets with a dry-erase marker while high above the Strip, because Steve Kerr felt he was wasting valuable seconds during timeouts as he coached the Warriors in the Las Vegas Summer League.

That was last July, two months after being hired, as he took the unusual approach of working the Golden State sideline in Vegas, a job most every other coach left to junior members of the staff. Later in the offseason, Kerr and his top assistant, Alvin Gentry, would sit in Kerr's office at Warriors headquarters in downtown Oakland and discuss ways to diagram Xs and Os. Label players by initials? By position? By position number?

Nothing would be left to chance. Everything would be planned. Just as Kerr for years kept a notebook of coaching moves he gathered during travels as a TNT analyst -- see someone run a good sideline out of bounds, jot it down for future appropriation -- so too would he be in an empty Vegas hotel room simulating a timeout as bedlam crashed around him with four seconds to go and the Warriors down one on the road.

Dry-erase pen. Grease board.

Go!

The result has been the appearance of a seamless transition for a coach in his first season on the job, at any level and in any role. Golden State is in the Finals against the Cavaliers, starting Thursday night at Oracle, in part because Kerr has handled the job with a veteran's hand, game-planning the Warriors to No. 1 in the league in defensive efficiency and No. 2 in offensive while displaying intuitive lineup moves and a personality with the perfect mix of confidence and humble vulnerability.

To say he has done better than expected, from 67-15 as the best record in the regular season to 12-3 in the playoffs, would be an understatement -- "I think he would even admit it," general manager Bob Myers said. "We didn't put the number 67 up there. We didn't put that on any board. There was never an internal memo. That never got uttered from anybody's lips as far as I know. If it would have, we would have laughed. Usually a season does not go as expected. Either it goes better or worse. It's hard to say exactly where you'll end up when the season started. We didn't know, so he exceeded our expectations. The team exceeded our expectations. They may privately admit they exceeded some of their own expectations. But that's a good result."

Steve Kerr's relationship with MVP Stephen Curry has been pivotal to the Warriors' championship hopes.
Ezra Shaw / NBAE via Getty Images

Then again, Kerr's basketball life has always been about overachieving. He received light recruiting interest out of high school in Pacific Palisades, Calif., then played four seasons at the University of Arizona, leaving as the career leader in three-point percentage and twice being named All-Pacific 10 Conference. He was a second-round pick in the NBA, No. 50 overall, then played 15 years and became one of 26 players ever to win five titles. His 2014-15 is just the latest overachievement.

While it is partly the fortune of taking over a good team as opposed to a coaching change as part of a reclamation project, as he is the first to admit, his impact has been undeniable. Under Kerr, and backed by Gentry's background in offense, the new staff delivered on the expectation from management that the Warriors move the ball better than previous years. The improved flow became one of the reasons for the success. At the same time, the foundation of defense in place from the Mark Jackson years remained with Kerr and his assistant specializing in that area, Ron Adams.

"It's felt very natural," Kerr said of the transition. "The biggest help in the transition is the fact that we have a hell of a team. I mean, let's be honest. If I didn't have good talent on this team I'd be a lousy coach. But we're winning and we have great talent and so people are praising me and probably overlooking mistakes that I make or whatever. Or maybe the mistakes that I'm making aren't even exposed because we're winning, because we have great talent. I'm just lucky because most first-time coaches don't inherit great teams and I have, and that's helped the transition more than anything.

"I think once we got through training camp and got into the exhibition season I felt really good. Training camp was dicey because it was the first time for everything. The first time we had the staff together, the first our players had been with us. Training camp was a little wild. Our team, it took us a while to get used to taking care of the ball and really understand the value of possessions and all that."

After that: 67-15.

Despite his personable demeanor, Kerr has shown a stern side in his first season on the sidelines, too.
Noah Graham / NBAE via Getty Images

"The biggest thing that I didn't foresee was how little time you have for all the details," Kerr said. "You have all these thoughts in your mind. We'll practice our three-point defense a couple times a week. Do we foul at the end of a game? Do we not? How do we handle no timeouts and we have the ball on the side? What are we going to do? Do we have a set call or do we allow the players to call something? There's so many little subtle things that you figure, 'All right, well we're going to work on this.' But it's hard to find the time. You get into the season, four games in five nights, you have to give them the night off on the one. Shootarounds, you can't grind them to death, so you only have 45 minutes and you've got so many other things to worry about. You have a game plan for the opposition, the five-on-0 offensive stuff that you want to do. Getting shots up. You end up sort of getting behind on little key details. You worry about it, but then realize there's not a whole lot you can do unless you want to just wear the guys out and have them on the floor too long, and that's counter-productive. You've got to find the balance."

There is no way to practice that in a Vegas suite. Kerr adapted, handled the unexpected challenges, coached the Western Conference All-Stars, helped turn what should have been a rugby scrum of a conference race into a runaway, smiled a lot and tore into players behind the scenes a few times. He found that balance, too.

Mostly, he came across as a 10th-year coach as his intelligence was joined by the preparation and communication skills that "made it an easier transition for him," said Gentry, who was named Pelicans coach on Saturday but will stay on the Golden State bench through the end of the Finals. "He's not a guy that's afraid to say, 'I made a mistake on that. I've got to be better on that.' I think it endears him to our players." It's done more than that.

It's put the Warriors within range of their first championship since 1975.

Scott Howard-Cooper has covered the NBA since 1988. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter.

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