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05/02 16:26 CDT Appreciation: Gregg Popovich had a view of the world, and it
changed both the Spurs and the NBA
Appreciation: Gregg Popovich had a view of the world, and it changed both the
Spurs and the NBA
By TIM REYNOLDS
AP Basketball Writer
Gregg Popovich understood the world.
That goes back long before the basketball world knew who he was. It probably
can be traced to at least Popovich's time at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where
he majored in Soviet studies and was on his way to becoming a spy.
He became an icon instead.
Popovich's time as coach of the San Antonio Spurs ended Friday, six months
after a stroke essentially ended his tenure --- in that capacity, anyway ---
without him knowing it. He stepped down, Mitch Johnson was promoted from acting
coach to head coach, and just like that, the Spurs started a new chapter.
Popovich isn't going anywhere. He's still the team president. He'll be around.
He'll have influence. His role going forward is probably largely up to him, a
right that he's earned over the last 30 or so years. His view of the world
shaped many of the things that the Spurs are today. Same goes for the rest of
the league as well, and as proof, look at any roster these days.
Some of the best players in the game --- Nikola Jokic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander,
Luka Doncic, Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Spurs' own franchise player in
Victor Wembanyama among them --- were born outside the United States. Would
they have been in the league without Popovich? Almost certainly, yes. But did
Popovich and the Spurs help create the path that saw more international players
get into the league? Most definitely.
"They were a pioneer around the international game," NBA Commissioner Adam
Silver said of the Spurs --- specifically Popovich and his longtime right-hand
man, team CEO R.C. Buford --- earlier this year. "They were scouting
internationally in a deep way long before many other teams."
Basketball is played all over the world, and Popovich --- forever the student
--- wanted to learn about all of it. He was finding players in Europe in the
late 1980s, long before it became common. As the stories go, Popovich still
can't walk around places like Belgrade without being recognized. That's
probably not much of an exaggeration, either.
Just look at the roster of all-time Spurs greats: France's Tony Parker and
Argentina's Manu Ginobili formed one of the league's all-time Big Threes with
Tim Duncan --- another player whose view of the world was perhaps a bit
different, having grown up in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Boris Diaw, Tiago Splitter, Marco Belinelli, Beno Udrih, Jakob Poeltl, Fabricio
Oberto, Pau Gasol and many more were part of the Spurs program as well.
Popovich had international coaches --- Italy's Ettore Messina made big
headlines in Europe when he joined the Spurs, for example. And Popovich picked
the brains of others when he was coaching the U.S. national team, including
former French national team coach (and Wembanyama's coach) Vincent Collet,
someone he went head-to-head with for Olympic gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021.
"There are smart people everywhere," Popovich once said, around the time he was
taking over as the U.S. coach. "None of us has it all figured out. Everybody
brings something to the table that you might not have thought about."
If anyone came close to having it all figured out, it was Popovich.
He's a Basketball Hall of Famer. The NBA's all-time win leader. A five-time
champion with the Spurs. Coached the U.S. to Olympic gold. And that's just the
stuff everybody knows about. Ask the people who operate the San Antonio Food
Bank what Popovich has quietly done for them and the answers will take a while.
Same goes for the Innocence Project and St. Jude's Children's Hospital, two
other causes he supports.
Popovich was more than a coach. He was a guy from Indiana who could shoot the
ball well and was smart, parlayed that into an Air Force education, should have
made the 1972 U.S. Olympic team as a player, took some of the disappointment
from that and began learning how to coach instead, took over a Division III
team in California that had lost 88 consecutive conference games and turned it
into a champion, kept climbing the ladder and here we are.
The Air Force Academy --- a place he would return to many times after his
graduation --- taught him countless lessons, including to embrace different
views and to never stop evolving.
"What you learn there is to get over yourself," Popovich said. "It's not about
you."
He never stopped learning, either. He changed the Spurs. Changed the NBA, too.
Forget the championships and records and one-liners and everything else.
Popovich helped change the NBA.
That's his legacy.
___
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