Continuity flows from Popovich
Coach, 69, could have walked away, but returns despite internal friction.
There were no guarantees. Maybe SAN ANTONIO — Gregg Popovich never even considered walking away, and maybe nobody really expected him to.
But the option was there, and nobody would have blamed him for taking it.
Hadn’t he seen enough basketball for a lifetime? Hadn’t he endured enough of the silliness, enough of the headaches, and enough of the manufactured drama that he knew as well as anyone paled in comparison to the stuff that really matters?
There are still a few nice restaurants in this world where Popovich has not dined yet, and still a couple of wines he has yet to taste. After he lost his wife in April following a two-decade health battle he never discussed publicly, wouldn’t everyone have understood if he decided to sit on some beach on a Greek island for a year or five?
He didn’t do that, of course. Last week, the man with ample money and curiosity to fly anywhere on the globe chose to board a plane to San Diego, not to sightsee but instead to recruit.
He talked to Kawhi Leonard and tried to solve a problem he could have just walked away from, and we don’t know for sure what he said. But I wonder if, in the middle of that conversation, Leonard pondered for even a second why Popovich thought
it was so important to get back to work.
And I wonder if that gave Leonard any pause about his desire to get away.
A couple of nights later, the man who could have thrown his cell phone into the ocean was using it instead to talk to a teenager from Reading, Pennsylvania. The Spurs had just made Lonnie Walker IV their first-round draft pick Thursday, and so Popovich set forth on starting another new relationship.
He did this knowing full well that in the coming months and perhaps years, Walker will make him yell and scream and want to tear his hair out, just like every other player he has coached. He did this knowing full well that even if Walker becomes the player and the person the Spurs hope he will, there might come a day when Popovich will have to get on a plane and recruit him all over again, just like he did with Leonard.
And so during a week and a year in which so much has gone wrong for the Spurs, who find themselves worried about what might fall apart and who might want to leave, there was some reassuring news, too.
Popovich got on the plane. He picked up the phone. And for a franchise in dire need of some normalcy, he was there to provide it.
It can’t have been easy. Erin Popovich died the day before Game 3 of April’s firstround playoff series loss to Golden State, and Gregg Popovich missed both of the final two losses. Per his instructions, the Spurs did not conduct a moment of silence, or any other tribute, before either of those two games, and he has not conducted an interview since. He wanted no attention to be drawn to himself or to his grief, and that was no surprise.
A Spurs staffer said there have been moments this offseason when Popovich has allowed himself to show just a little bit of his anguish, but for the most part, it has been business as usual. He’s been as involved as ever in roster planning, and everything else that his title of president of Spurs basketball entails. If he thought at all about leaving, that notion apparently did not last long.
As the Kawhi drama lingers, the Spurs face a leverage problem. For Kawhi Leonard’s camp, trade discussions are non-existent, but league chatter continues. As insurance, the Spurs drafted Miami guard Lonnie Walker.
It has been written in this space before that the natural assumption about Popovich — who turned 69 in January — is that his upcoming stint as head coach of Team USA at the 2020 Summer Olympics would mark an obvious possible endpoint to his NBA career. A recent national report echoed that sentiment, but no such plans even are set in sand, let alone in stone.
What is clear is he will be back next season to coach another game. He will have to talk to reporters again, even if the thought of avoiding us forever might have tempted him more than even those faraway restaurants and wines did.
And he will be back with a team that might not be a leading contender for a championship, but one that he certainly will expect to win more than it loses. It is difficult to imagine the Spurs going into complete rebuild mode now, even if the Leonard situation cannot be fixed. They did, after all, just win 47 games without getting anything from their star player, and they presumably should get something in a trade that will help add to that.
If that sounds depressing to Spurs fans unaccustomed to lowering their standards, perhaps some comfort can be taken in this age of discontent, anyway.
Yes, maybe this will turn out to be the summer when one Spurs icon found a reason to leave. But it’s also the summer when another found a reason to stay.