As the power of a coach fades, Pop could be the last of a dying breed

Sports Illustrated asked this weekend if NBA coaches still matter. The Spurs will learn the answer for themselves soon enough.

When the man who’s won more games than anyone in league history walks away, San Antonio will replace him with someone who won’t wield the same power or command the same respect, because nobody on the sideline does anymore.

“Only one guy left,”

Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal told SI, “and that’s Gregg Popovich.”

Popovich, for his part, always has scoffed at such notions of his singularity. He’s maintained for more than two decades that all he did was get lucky enough to end up with Tim Duncan, and he never stops reminding himself of to whom he owes his livelihood.

To this day, any time he

and his current or former assistants are able to have a meal together, they give a toast.

“Thank you, Timmy,” they say, clinking their glasses, while their basketball benefactor no doubt sits at home squeezing a video-game controller.

But just as Duncan was the last of his kind — something surely to be noted when he is enshrined in the Hall of Fame next Saturday — there’s a good chance Popovich will be the last of his. As the excellent piece by SI’s Howard Beck pointed out, Popovich fit into the “Great Man Theory of NBA coaching” that spanned from Red Auerbach to Pat Riley to Phil Jackson.

“And you could say that model is outdated, even obsolete,” Beck wrote.

There remain a few thriving, mutually beneficial superstarcoach relationships in basketball — Steph Curry and Steve Kerr in Golden State being the closest modern incarnation of Duncan and Popovich or Michael Jordan and Jackson — but they’re becoming more temporary than ever.

LeBron James has won titles this decade with Erik Spoelstra, Tyronn Lue and Frank Vogel. Kawhi Leonard won with Popovich and Nick Nurse, and now is trying with Lue. As SI put it, “Coaching still matters, but coaches seem like an afterthought.”

This, obviously, is not a brand-new trend. People have been discussing and writing about how escalating player salaries have been tipping the balance of power away from coaching staffs for decades now. Jackson never was foolish enough to think he had more say than Jordan with the Bulls, or than O’Neal or Kobe Bryant with the Lakers.

And maybe O’Neal was wrong when he said the league never will see those kinds of playercoach relationships again, but he’s probably not far off. Those bonds take time to develop, and it’s tough for a star to spend more than five years with the same coach when he can’t spend that long in the same city.

This, in part, is what makes Popovich the exception. For three years now, the head coach has been the most famous Spur, and it hasn’t been particularly close.

Will that ever be the case for any franchise again? As good as, say, Spoelstra and Kerr have been, it’s hard to imagine them sticking around long enough — or even being allowed to stick around long enough — to reach that point.

So the Spurs might be the last test of an acclaimed coach’s effect. There are those around the league who assert Popovich

has done some of the best coaching of his career during this rebuilding phase, even if the team doesn’t have a lot to show for it. They might have a point.

Forget about Duncan and the five championships for a second. Throughout three mediocre years, Popovich’s teams have played hard. The veterans consistently have bought in, and the youngsters consistently have looked prepared. And for those who consider that a low bar, look around at an All-Star throwing tantrums in Cleveland or backups yelling at assistants to “sit the (bleep) down” in Indiana to see how difficult avoiding dysfunction can be.

How much has having Popovich around meant? The Spurs might think they have an appreciation for it now, but won’t know for sure until he’s gone, whether that’s next season, after the Olympics, or later.

Maybe the next coach will have them launch more 3-pointers, and maybe the new coach will give every rookie 25 minutes per night, and maybe the new coach will deliver a fresh message that resonates with players like a septuagenarians’ lectures didn’t.

But at some point in that uncertain future, on a day when the Spurs are led by one of the many faceless, interchangeable, quickly replaceable coaches deemed acceptable by the star of the moment, they will remember what it was like when who the coach was mattered. We’ll see if they miss it.

And if the league does, too.

Maddie Malhotra / Getty Images When Gregg Popovich finally steps down from the Spurs, the franchise likely will replace him with someone who won’t wield the same power or command the same respect.