Three hours at the Oklahoma City airport is usually a recipe for a bad day, but for Steve Kerr they were some of the most pivotal moments of his post-playing career.

It was May 2014, and Kerr was in town to call the Thunder’s playoff series for TNT. He’d been itching to get out of the broadcast booth and onto a sideline. The Clippers had just eliminated the Warriors in the first round, leading Golden State to fire coach Mark Jackson.

Then-Warriors general manager Bob Myers asked Kerr if they could meet. In a matter of days, Kerr, Myers, team owner Joe Lacob and front office executives Kirk Lacob and Travis Schlenk met at an airport hangar. The Warriors were in the market for a new culture, and Kerr had a PowerPoint presentation laying one out.

From 2012 to that moment, Kerr had written down all his thoughts on coaching. What his rules for the team plane would be. The kind of defensive assistant he’d like to hire. Post-game workouts for players who didn’t play. His vision for his offense.

He still has the presentation somewhere, but “It needs an update,” Kerr said in December.

The Warriors offered him the job. Part Phil Jackson, Pete Carroll and Bill Walsh, the dogma of Kerr was coming to Golden State.With the Warriors’ win on Thursday, Kerr is six victories from tying the late Al Attles for most regular-season victories in franchise history at 557. His run — four championships, a .646 winning percentage and a Coach of the Year Award — began a decade ago in that inaugural title season.

The biggest “sliding doors” moment for Kerr was turning down his mentor and Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson in New York. He’d agreed in principle to coach the Knicks and told Jackson, then a team executive, he was coming.

Then the Warriors stepped in.

“One of the lessons I learned in this league is timing is everything,” Kerr said.

In his preparation for a head-coaching job, Kerr met with coaches in different sports. Right after taking the Warriors job, he visited Carroll, then the Seattle Seahawks’ coach, for training camp.

As a 49ers assistant earlier in his career, Carroll would sit with Bill Walsh, a consultant at the time, and pick his brain after every practice. The Super Bowl champion passed along Walsh’s teachings to Kerr.

Carroll explained that coaching isn’t the plays you draw up in a huddle but rather the values you hold and how you make them come alive within a team. How a great coach needs to be “uncommonly consistent” to prevent big games from feeling too big — another Walsh lesson.

“It was a fascinating conversation and one of the most important lessons of my life,” Kerr said.

Carroll asked Kerr to think of the values most important to him as a human being. At his hotel later that night, he whittled his list down to four: joy, competitiveness, mindfulness and compassion.

“What Pete explained to me is it’s not words on a wall,” Kerr said. “You don’t come in and write joy on a wall. You have joy every day. If it’s a real value, then you’re a joyful person. I love the game, I love life, I love the camaraderie. Love the process of work. So that has to be on display every day in your building. That’s what I think the great programs, organizations (do). The Bulls with Phil Jackson — his culture was so unique to him. The Spurs with Gregg Popovich — it was so unique with him. Palpable. You can feel it. The players feel that, it comes alive every day, and it’s not a bunch of (expletive). It’s real. And then you can sort through all this adversity because you have trust.”

Kerr had to put it all into practice without any coaching experience. Carroll could relate — when he first started coaching, he “didn’t know nothing.” It took getting fired from the Patriots and finding success at Southern Cal for him to have an epiphany about coaching philosophy, which he relayed to Kerr.

“I didn’t want him to have to suffer through the struggles of realizing what the hell you don’t know, what you don’t know about all this job calls for,” Carroll said.

After his training camp trip, Kerr made a point to visit every Warrior player he was about to coach (except for the notoriously hard-to-pin-down Klay Thompson), explaining his vision and setting expectations. He flew to Australia to meet with Andrew Bogut. Stopped in Miami to see Harrison Barnes. Had dinner with Andre Iguodala at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. Drove from his home in San Diego to Beverly Hills to connect with David Lee.

The early days of preseason camp were “chaos,” Kerr remembers. He wanted to install a completely new offense, blending systems he used as a player under Jackson in Chicago and Popovich in San Antonio with other influences. After every practice and game, he displayed the Warriors’ number of passes on a whiteboard to hammer home their ball-movement identity.

One of Kerr’s first moves as a coach was convincing Iguodala, their All-Star free agent acquisition that year, to come off the bench. He inserted Draymond Green into the starting lineup when David Lee got hurt in the preseason and never turned back. Golden State started the season 21-2 and went from last in the league in passes per game to ninth.

Even as the team was winning, there were always challenges, especially for a rookie head coach. Personalities to manage, injuries, newfound attention for Steph Curry in his first MVP season. The values had to persist. Uncommonly consistent. It didn’t hurt that Curry, in many regards a basketball kindred soul with Kerr, completely bought in after previously advocating for Mark Jackson to remain the coach.

“I think we had a pretty unique culture that was based on Steph,” Kerr said. “But also based on the vibe that we had in our building every day, which was a pretty unique combination of competitiveness and joy. That wasn’t by accident, it was purposeful.”

The Warriors went 67-15, but the coaching staff felt the team was hitting a lull around February. Kerr called a team meeting to challenge the players, telling them to regain their focus and prepare for the playoffs. He told the team they had what they needed to win it all.

“He’s not a type of coach that’s a ‘rah-rah, I’m going to inspire my guys today, see what I can get out of them,’ ” assistant coach and longtime friend Bruce Fraser said. “He’s a sensible leader, only speaks the harsh truth when it needs to be spoken. He uses his words wisely.”

Kerr didn’t draw on his past as a five-time champion with the Bulls and Spurs in his speech, but his message carried weight because of it. He was delivering it to an audience that hadn’t yet broken through.

The Warriors won their first title since 1975, proving him right. They did have what it takes to win a title.

“Dream season,” Kerr said. “We won 67 games, never got taken to a seventh game in the playoffs. You can’t script that.”