Head coach has always been a thankless job. That's just how it goes when winning is the expectation and losing isn't just a bummer but an existential tragedy. 

Steve Kerr is well aware of what he signed up for — as he said after leading the U.S. to a gold medal game victory over France on Saturday, "we might be the only team in the world whose fans are ashamed of them if they get a silver medal".  To be clear: Kerr didn't mean that as a bad thing. Really, it's the reason he accepted the gig in the first place: Great pressure only comes with great talent and great stakes, the kind that Kerr has become intimately familiar with as both a player (where he won three rings with Michael Jordan and the Bulls and two more with Tim Duncan and the Spurs) and coach (where he's won four NBA Finals with the Golden State Warriors). 

So Kerr didn't flinch when the heat started to come almost from the moment the Paris Olympics began. He never wavered as he became a lightning rod for criticism over his starting lineup decisions and in-game rotations, sitting Jayson Tatum in the opener against Serbia and Joel Embiid against South Sudan. Kerr simply stood in front of the microphones each day and answered the questions, coolly and calmly. He talked about the collective talent of his roster, and being unselfish, and how it would take all 12 players to get where the team wanted — was expected — to go. He had a vision, one that he trusted even if it seemed like many back home harbored doubt.

That vision was validated on Saturday night, as Kerr's Team USA held off France in the fourth quarter to capture a fifth straight gold medal. The U.S. didn't outlast Serbia and France over these last two games by simply rolling the ball out. It won by embracing a very FIBA style of basketball, one that stressed physicality, depth, fluidity in the half-court on offense and grinding together on defense. (The U.S. averaged 28 assists per game in Paris. The next closest team? Serbia — at 24.2.) Kerr knew that the only way to instill that style, to bake it into this team's DNA, was to play a 10-man rotation, to convince the entire team that everyone was equal and everyone had a role. It's easy to simply look at the names on the jerseys and the numbers in the box scores and scoff at the idea that the U.S. was tested at all, much less nearly lost. But that's a view increasingly detached from reality; the rest of the world has gotten too good to think that it's enough to rely on talent alone. America has to give a little, to acknowledge the way the international game is played and meet it halfway. As Dwayne Wade noted on the broadcast after the U.S. clinched gold, "It's never going to be 1992 again".

The ghost of the Dream Team will always haunt its successors, and it is unrealistic to expect fans' expectations to ease up; this is America's game, one we view as a sort of birthright, and remaining atop the mountain is important in an almost primal way. It would be easy for the weight of all of that to start to wear on a team, especially as the clock winds down and a hostile crowd begins to roar with belief. And yet, time and again, the U.S. answered the bell.

"We just kept our composure," LeBron James said after the win over France. "We have been in some tight games throughout the preliminary games, and we had a tight game against Serbia so we knew we were going to get everybody's biggest punch, so it was all about staying composed and willing our way to victory."

That composure starts with Kerr, who projects it at all times no matter the circumstance. He built belief in playing a certain way, and he managed to sustain it across the entire roster for two whole weeks. That's no small feat, especially considering the names involved. This team played as one, and everyone delivered when called upon. Embiid sat against South Sudan, but when the U.S. needed him desperately in the semifinal against Nikola Jokic and Serbia — the game and the matchup Team USA recruited him for — the big fella played the most engaged game we've seen from him in quite some time, not just asserting himself on offense but moving his feet like a madman on the other end. 

That has always been Kerr's hallmark, even with Golden State, and he deserves loads of credit — for convincing Team USA to adopt it as its own, for weathering the storms that come with this job, and for delivering on the silent agreement to bring home that all-important basketball gold.