A gentler Pop? Not so fast
SAN ANTONIO — The old man was going soft.
The first sign came over the summer in Japan, where on a jubilant afternoon he let his eyes well up and his guard go down and his voice crack with something you could have sworn was sentimentality.
Then he came home and went back to work, but where was the vintage scowl? Was this lifelong curmudgeon really chuckling at jokes that weren’t particularly funny and role-playing as a TV cameraman and indulging not only a couple of pressconference questions, but all of them, including the dumb ones?
After all this time, in his 73rd year on Earth and his 26th season as coach of the San Antonio Spurs, had he at last allowed himself to relax? Were we finally seeing a kinder, gentler Gregg Popovich? We were indeed.
But on opening night, with the Spurs leading Orlando by a dozen, Drew Eubanks neglected to properly defend a ball screen.
And then, for dang near the entirety of a paintpeeling, face-blistering, censored-for-decency timeout, Popovich proceeded to remind his backup center — and everyone else — that this coach isn’t ready for the rocking chair quite yet.
“There are certain things that can’t be allowed,” Popovich said later. “And they’ve got to know that that’s serious stuff.”
Even by Popovich’s standards it was an alltimer of a tongue-lashing, made all the more amusing by the circumstances. This was the first night of a season with the lowest outside expectations for the Spurs in at least three decades, in which Popovich conceivably is feeling less pressure than he ever has before. His team was well on its way to a blowout 123-97 victory over a bad opponent when Eubanks committed the mortal sin of not “showing” by getting his hand up on a Terrence Ross 3-point attempt.
Popovich greeted Eubanks near midcourt with a choice series of invectives. He kept screaming as he followed him to the bench. Then he squatted down in front of him and kept going.
A kinder, gentler Popovich?
“He has his moments,” shooting guard Derrick White said, grinning. “It is what it is.”
The thing is, nobody should have expected anything different. Popovich looked and sounded loose over the past month, but he often does during the preseason.
As satisfying as coaching Team USA to an Olympic gold medal surely was for him, and as sincere as he might be about how much he’s been invigorated by coaching a young team with no All-Stars and plenty of rough edges, he wasn’t going to change who he was in one offseason.
If it hadn’t been Eubanks, it would have been someone else by the end of the night. In fact, during the first timeout of the season — a couple of quarters before Eubanks’ lapse — Popovich made clear his thoughts on his team’s lack of energy, even if White tried his best to clean up the message in his retelling of it.
“It was pretty nice,” White said, unable to keep a straight face. “He said, ‘Come on, guys. Pick it up.’ ”
Said starting center Jakob Poeltl: “Those are the type of moments where Pop is trying to make a point, trying to get the energy going again. You learn from your mistake and you move on to the next play.”
It’s always been that way. David Robinson understood it. Tim Duncan understood it. Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker and Kawhi Leonard and DeMar DeRozan understood it. And while Popovich is jumping into a new era of basketball with both feet, as his team pushes the pace and fires away from 3-point range, he’s not going to let his guys turn a sense of freedom into an excuse for cutting corners.
“On the big-ticket items, the ones that the basketball gods have etched in stone, we can’t let those go,” Popovich said. “And (the players) have got to know that there is a consequence, so to speak.”
Popovich isn’t being unrealistic. He realizes that the players on this roster are going to mess up more often than Duncan, Ginobili and Parker did. And there will be times — if there haven’t been already — when Popovich will bite his tongue when he sees a second-year player make a mistake he would have berated a future Hall of Famer for committing.
But here is where the catch comes in: It would be easier for Popovich to stay relaxed if he didn’t think this version of the Spurs has potential. The more progress they make, the more he’ll want to fix their flaws.
And as for that kinder, gentler Popovich?
Hey, there’s always next year.