Pop gets his dream job
For Spurs coach, a second job as head of national team comes at just the right time
Had he stuck to his oft-cited timetable, Gregg Popovich could have dodged the whole Kawhi Leonard commotion. The escape path had been established long before this summer’s trade saga that dragged the previously dramaproof San Antonio Spurs into the NBA’s ever-spinning reality show blender at last.
How many times over the years did Popovich tell us he would be walking right out the exit door behind Tim Duncan when the greatest Spur of them all decided to stop playing?
“I kind of believed that,” Popovich said the other day in a telephone interview, harkening back to what became one of his go-to proclamations.
“Or maybe I was trying to make myself believe it — that I was just going to go out on Timmy’s coattails.”
Duncan, of course, retired after the 2015-16 season. Popovich, the Spurs’ coach since 1996, not only has one season remaining on a five-year contract extension he signed in 2014 after San Antonio won its last championship — he’s about to start a second job.
On Thursday in Las Vegas, Nev., Popovich’s tenure as the next coach of the U.S. men’s basketball team — and the successor to the wildly successful Mike Krzyzewski — begins in earnest. Thirty-five American stars have been invited to two days of light practices and bonding meetings to launch the transition from Duke University’s Coach K to San Antonio’s Pop.
“This summer is more about camaraderie than coaching,” Popovich said.
That certainly covers the nationalteam portion of Popovich’s offseason, but the rest of it can’t be so neatly summed up. On the court, and especially off it, Popovich has never faced a more challenging period.
Impervious to player insurrections for nearly two decades — thanks mostly to Duncan’s unwavering devotion to the organization after his free-agent flirtation with the Orlando Magic in 2000 — Popovich’s Spurs are reeling in the wake of Leonard’s departure.
Leonard informed the Spurs in June that he wanted to be traded and would leave them without compensation in free agency in July 2019 if they didn’t accommodate the request. On Wednesday, Popovich and R.C. Buford, the Spurs’ president, reluctantly complied.
San Antonio dealt Leonard to the Toronto Raptors after conceding that Popovich, who said he had fielded a similar request for the first time as a coach from All-Star forward LaMarcus Aldridge last summer, wouldn’t be able to talk his way into a recon-
ciliation as he did with Aldridge.
In addition to the unprecedented organizational turmoil, Popovich’s return to the floor this week comes amid great personal loss. His wife, Erin, died in April at age 67 after dealing with a long-term illness, which led Popovich to step away from the Spurs’ final three games in their first-round series with the Golden State Warriors.
Popovich’s re-emergence into the public eye came Wednesday at a hastily called news conference after the Leonard trade. Asked how he had been coping with events both at and away from work, Popovich offered a brief acknowledgment that “it’s been difficult.”
Popovich’s closest friends, then, are understandably hoping that stepping into the U.S. national team role — his dream job — can provide a sanctuary from everything else.
“He doesn’t need any advice from me,” said Don Nelson, whose bond with Popovich dates to Pop’s time as an assistant under Nelson with Golden State in the early 1990s.
“It’s a hard job, but he’s been around this team before,” said Nelson, who coached the second incarnation of the so-called Dream Team at the 1994 world championships. “He knows what to do. Hopefully it’ll be good for him.”
Popovich was indeed an assistant with the national team, first under George Karl and then Larry Brown, with squads that flopped at the 2002 world championships in Indianapolis (finishing sixth) and the 2004 Olympics in Greece (finishing third). The subsequent decision of USA Basketball’s managing director, Jerry Colangelo, to name Krzyzewski as Brown’s replacement, instead of Popovich, spurred a frostiness between Colangelo and Popovich that took a decade to thaw.
But Colangelo had only one name in mind when Krzyzewski decided he would step down after the 2016 Summer Games in Rio. So he courted Popovich hard in 2015 and convinced the former Air Force Academy cadet to add international basketball to his Spurs duties. Popovich, for the record, agreed to take the job only if Colangelo pledged to stay on through the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
“This will probably be good for Pop to be able to focus on something a little bit different than Spurs business, even if it’s only for a few days,” Colangelo said. “I recall with Coach K, people would always ask him, ‘How are you going to handle two big jobs at once?’ He always said that it’s not only refreshing but, ‘I need this.’ It kept him re-energized.”
Different adjectives may apply if Leonard attends the minicamp. All eyes at the open-to-themedia workouts are bound to laser in on every coach-player interaction should Popovich and his now-former franchise player wind up in the same gym — especially with DeMar DeRozan, San Antonio’s prime acquisition in the trade with Toronto, also on the list of invitees.
But USA Basketball officials are bracing for Leonard to invoke his right to pass on the non-mandatory sessions, as LeBron James and Stephen Curry have done, as he continues his recovery from the mysterious quadriceps injury that led to the unraveling of his relationship with the Spurs. Leonard, after all, might dread the glare of the spotlight more than Popovich.
“He’s a maybe,” Colangelo said of Leonard’s attending the camp.
Popovich, mind you, is not likely to reveal much about any interactions with Leonard even if the player does show, whether in front of the audience at UNLV’s Mendenhall Center or in private.
Those who know Popovich best have said he had long been curious about what it would be like to coach beyond Duncan, even as he frequently stated publicly that he would retire with him. Yet he remains as consistent as any coach the NBA has ever seen — which means you needn’t hold one breath waiting for Pop to expound on classified team business.
“I’m not too interested in talking about the past,” Popovich said of the Leonard situation. “It doesn’t do us any good whatsoever.”
As fiercely patriotic as anyone in basketball, Popovich inevitably prefers to focus on the new gig. He turns 70 in January, and suddenly must replace perhaps the most imposing two-way force in the game at his day job, but there was only ever going to be one answer when Colangelo proposed doubling his workload.
“It’s an absolutely humbling endeavor and an honor to be asked to do this,” Popovich said. “It’s bigger than any one game or any one season.
“I feel that already. I think about it every day to some extent.”