Steve Kerr speaks at the interview room before an NBA game between the Houston Rockets and the Golden State Warriors at Chase Center in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 2023. 

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. 

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

That came one day after Kerr reportedly agreed to return to Golden State as their head coach on a two-year deal that will keep him as the NBA’s highest-paid coach. Kerr’s decision ended more than three weeks of uncertainty about whether or not he’d be back and included several reports about ESPN’s pursuit of Kerr.

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........

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