Popovich rant hits at owners.
Pop’s latest political comments hit close to home
Gregg Popovich was seething, even more than usual, and this time his outrage took him to a place where he’d never ventured in public. This time he didn’t stop with the politicians. This time he wanted to follow the money. “We need to find out who funds these people,” the Spurs coach said at the end of a long Monday Zoom monologue about the Minnesota police shooting of Daunte Wright, and about the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riots, and about state officials’ response to February power outages in Texas, and about what he called the false claims of election fraud associated with voter suppression efforts.
“I want to know what owners in the NBA fund these people who perpetrate these lies. Maybe that’s a good place to start, so it’s all transparent. That’s all I got.”
With that, Popovich stood up and walked away from the camera, but he had to have known where his question would lead people.
He had to have known how close to home they would find the answers.
And he had to have known that the layer of his political commentary that most people seldom mention was about to become impossible to ignore.
It’s never been a secret that Popovich has voted differently than the people who sign his checks.
For much of the past five years, he routinely has criticized the policies and legacy of Donald Trump, the former president supported financially by prominent members of the team’s own
ership group. According to an online database maintained by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, former Spurs chairwoman Julianna Hawn Holt has made multiple donations to Trump’s campaigns, including in 2020, when she also contributed to Republican Georgia U.S. Senate candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
It should be noted that Holt’s son Peter J. Holt replaced her as chairman of the team’s ownership group in 2019. It’s also worth pointing out that when the organization produced a series of powerful “Spurs Voices” videos about racial injustice in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death last spring, the younger Holt participated in the project.
“I must listen and learn now more than ever,” Peter J. Holt said in his “Voices” video. “As an organization, we believe we can do more to address the systemic racism in our society, and we embrace this opportunity.”
Much like his mother and father (Peter M. Holt spent the previous 20 years as the team’s chairman), the younger Holt has operated mostly in silence. As expected, the team declined to comment Tuesday when asked about the Holts’ reaction to Popovich’s remarks.
If they held to tradition, the family didn’t bring it up with the coach, either. On numerous occasions over the past couple of years, Popovich has insisted he’s never been discouraged by the team’s owners from speaking out about Trump, or about any other political issues.
Popovich has a platform, and nobody is trying to take it away from him.
And if a difference of opinion exists between the coaches and players on the floor and the people on the board, that doesn’t exactly make the Spurs unique in the NBA.
Last September, citing Federal Election Commission data, The Ringer reported that seven of the nine NBA owners with the most political contributions since 2015 donated mainly to Republicans.
Since 2015, the Holt family donated $1.42 million to Republican candidates and political action committees, per The Ringer. Orlando’s Dan Devos, Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert and New York’s James Dolan each donated more to the GOP.
In a league that has embraced progressive causes and splashed “Black Lives Matter” logos across the court during its restart last season, that disconnect doesn’t get mentioned often. Popovich didn’t start there Monday. He might not have intended to get there.
But as he grew more emotional about the death of Wright, who was shot by a police officer in Minnesota in what the local police chief described as a tragic accident, it took him to what he considered a lack of empathy, and then to what he refers to as “The Big Lie” about the election being stolen.
“Do these people want a country or not?” Popovich said. “Do these people have grandchildren? Do they want their grandchildren to go to work and school and go through these drills and worry about being murdered? What does it take to care more about them than your frickin’ position, and your power, and your donors?”
That’s when he took the leap he’d never taken.
And when he demanded to know about NBA owners’ contributions? He probably didn’t expect the Spurs’ group to answer.
The silence will continue.
It just will be a little more noticeable than it was before.