Pop makes history twice
After breaking record for wins, coach allows himself rare moment of joy
SAN ANTONIO — At last, Gregg Popovich was powerless.
They were coming for him now, from all sides, and to scowl or to bark or to run would have been futile. So for 11 whole seconds, the winningest coach in the history of the NBA allowed his players to forget everything he’d ever taught them.
Grabbing him by the shoulders, one started jumping up and down, and then they all did, like schoolchildren, forgetting that a win is just a win, that there are more important things in the world than basketball, that individual accomplishments mean nothing. As the bouncing circle of bodies tightened around the 73-year-old man, he laughed as he doubled over to protect himself, perhaps letting himself forget, too.
Then, once he had indulged this sideline celebration 11 seconds longer than he’d planned, Popovich spread his arms. With his power restored, he ordered his jubilant Spurs to give him room, and they complied.
And when he walked off the AT&T Center floor, he did with not only the 1,336th regular-season victory of his career, but also the relief of having put a record chase he called “undeserving and quite awkward” behind him.
“They know how much I enjoy those sorts of things,” Popovich said of Jakob Poeltl, Lonnie Walker and the dozen other Spurs who mobbed him Friday after rallying to a 104-102 victory over Utah. “I’m going to bring ’em all in and have ’em run suicides before the game (Saturday).”
He hadn’t wanted any of this. He couldn’t even have conceived of it a half-century ago at the Air Force Academy, where as a skinny cadet he learned to love basketball under longtime confidant Hank Egan, or a quarter-century ago, when as the Spurs’ general manager he tabbed himself to step in for fired coach Bob Hill, or even nine years ago, when the pain from an NBA Finals heartbreak in Miami made the thought of sticking around this long seem like torture.
By 2019 he’d not only atoned for that disappointment with a fifth championship, he’d also broken the league’s career record for total coaching victories. For whatever reason, though, that one isn’t as celebrated as the regular-season mark, which until Friday had been held by Don Nelson, the guy who gave Popovich a job when he was out of work 30 years ago.
As a rule, Popovich is loath to reflect on his own successes, and those who know him best said that the fact that so much was being made of him passing Nelson — who’s remained a close friend — meant the days and weeks leading up to Friday were even more uncomfortable for him.
But as his Spurs — who’d never this season won a game they’d trailed in heading into the fourth quarter — stormed back from a 15-point deficit in the final period, fans in the arena could sense how much Popovich was living and dying with each possession. After one questionable foul call, he might have set a septuagenarian record for the vertical leap.
And after Dejounte Murray spearheaded a closing run that personified Popovich’s timeworn mantra of “pounding the rock” — a credo of persistence he borrowed from reformer Jacob Riis — the players made up their minds.
Permission or not, there was going to be a party.
“Tonight he had to enjoy it,” said Murray, who in the locker room presented Popovich with a game ball before the coach was doused with water. “There was no other option.”
It was fitting, in a way, that Popovich’s milestone came the way it did, in a season in which the Spurs have no surefire Hall of Famers on their roster, with only faint hopes of making the playoffs, on a night when other teams’ castoffs like Zach Collins and Josh Richardson were asked to do much of the work.
Popovich used to say he’d leave the day Tim Duncan did, but he proved himself wrong about that, because this is what he still loves about coaching. For the past five months, with his team mired near the bottom of the standings, he’s sounded as upbeat and as optimistic on a day-to-day basis as he ever has in his career. And as Murray pointed out, it’s not like Pop is good at faking emotion.
“It’s genuine,” said Spurs CEO R.C. Buford, who’s worked alongside Popovich for more than two decades. “He’s given this team freedom to learn and grow. A team that he normally would have strangled.”
There still are times when that old urge might arise. But it was not lost on Popovich, or on anyone around the team, that his young team’s breakthrough — and his recordbreaker — came against a Utah franchise he and Buford have long admired and often cited as a model for their system.
Winning No. 1,336 by blowing out Sacramento would have been fine. Doing it by pounding the rock against Utah? That’s meaningful.
“To win a game against a team like that,” Popovich said, “is why we do this.”
As expected, he tried his best to make the record about everyone but him. He praised multiple generations of his players, his staff and his “wonderful city,” saying “all of us share in this record.”
“It’s not mine,” Popovich said. “It’s ours. That’s the joy of it.”
And after seeing that famously intimidating authority figure doubled over in laughter, in the middle of that bouncing circle of overgrown schoolchildren, for 11 full seconds?
Who could dare tell him he was wrong?