An ESPN executive denied a Bay Area columnist’s report that the network offered Warriors head coach Steve Kerr a top broadcasting job. 

On Sunday, Awful Announcing wrote up a story citing San Francisco Standard columnist Tim Kawakami’s report that ESPN offered Kerr $7 million a year. Shortly after the story was published, ESPN content president Burke Magnus sent Awful Announcing a statement “categorically denying” the report. 

“We have too much respect for Coach Kerr. We were not even going to engage until he made a decision on coaching,” Magnus said. 

The first such report came when longtime NBA insider Marc Stein posted a notebook in his newsletter “The Stein Line” on May 3, saying the network was “lobbying Kerr aggressively to try to convince him to return to the world of NBA broadcasting.” But no one added more to the Kerr-ESPN conversation than Kawakami, who has been covering the Bay Area sports scene for more than two decades. 

Kawakami discussed the ESPN job on his “Warriors Plus Minus” podcast, which he co-hosts with the Athletic’s Marcus Thompson and Nick Friedell. In an episode published Wednesday, Kawakami corroborated Stein’s report, saying he had heard about it for two weeks, and added some key details. First, he said Kerr was offered ESPN’s color commentary spot on its top broadcasting team, effectively replacing the current duo of Richard Jefferson and Tim Legler to join ESPN’s longtime play-by-play man Mike Breen; and second, he said ESPN was offering Kerr around $7 million a year — far less than the $17.5 million he was making as coach.

Kawakami didn’t put these nuggets into his written columns until Saturday, after Kerr’s decision to return was first reported by (who else?) ESPN, via insiders Shams Charania, Anthony Slater and Ramona Shelburne. Kawakami reported that ESPN was “especially aggressive” about the chase, repeated the amount of money Kerr was offered and even added a third note into the report: “I heard [ESPN] was willing to meet almost any possible condition of his, including staying away from all hot-take panel shows.”

Kawakami and Thompson then fired the microphones back up on Saturday night for a reaction podcast to the news. Kawakami almost seemed to preemptively hit back at any ESPN denial when discussing the Kerr-Warriors negotiation and how much power Kerr had in the talks.

“Steve had ESPN. Let’s just say it, he had ESPN,” Kawakami said. “There was absolutely — if it wasn’t an actual offer, it was a tacit offer — to be their No. 1 analyst. That’s why I’m joking that the two happiest people tonight aren’t necessarily everybody involved with the Warriors, or Steve Kerr or his family. It’s Richard Jefferson and Tim Legler because they basically offered that job to Steve Kerr, and I know that. And it was multiple executives who were meeting either with Steve or with Steve’s representatives … it does give him an easy out. Like, ‘If I don’t want to do this, I’ve got this job, it’s a very good job.’ But I don’t think he really wants to do that job right now.” 

Thompson agreed and added: “If he wanted to, he would have done it.”

That led to Sunday, when Awful Announcing initially wrote up Kawakami’s report and Magnus refuted it after it was published. On Monday morning, Kawakami took to social media to acknowledge the “push-back” and said he could have worded his reporting better on the timing, but he didn’t back down from the gist of his report.

“ESPN execs made it clear to Kerr’s camp that if he left coaching they were prepared to offer a top-of-the-market deal, which is understood to be north of $6M per,” Kawakami wrote. He also added a second post: “And ESPN wasn’t the only network that let Kerr know this — IF he decided to leave the Warriors, the doors were wide open.”

It will be especially interesting to see if ESPN’s pursuit ends up getting a mention in a forthcoming feature profile about Kerr from Wright Thompson, a senior writer for — you guessed it — ESPN.