Raise a glass to Gregg Popovich, the gruff teddy bear who lifted the San Antonio Spurs into the NBA’s elite. After three decades on the Spurs’ sideline, he is stepping back from coaching to become the team’s president of basketball operations. It’s a back-to-the-future move for the 76-year-old: he was the Spurs’ general manager for eight years before he became the team’s coach. (“I’m no longer the coach, I’m El Jefe,” Popovich jokingly declared this week before unveiling a T-shirt with that Spanish title.) Altogether, Pop won five NBA championships from 1999 through 2014, a run that puts him among the greatest coaches in league history. But when it came to being the NBA’s unflinching statesman, he was in a league all by himself.
Popovich wasn’t just the NBA’s backbone. He was, perhaps, the most fearless truth teller in all of sport. Certainly no one was bolder when it came to taking on Donald Trump – whom Popovich has described as a “soulless coward,” a “pathological liar” and a “deranged idiot”. Popovich told beat reporters he was “sick to my stomach” after Trump’s 2016 presidential election win, a tipping point he likened to the fall of Rome. He slammed Steve Bannon’s appointment as chief White House strategist as a fear-mongering exercise. During the Spurs’ 2017 media day, Popovich launched into a 21-minute condemnation of Trump and the Maga movement after the president attacked NFL players and Nascar’s Bubba Wallace for their national anthem protests. “Our country is an embarrassment to the world,” Popovich said. “This is an individual that when people held arms during games, [he thought] that they were doing it to [dis]honor the flag. That’s delusional. But it’s what we have to live with.”
Related: From Brunson to Ant-Man: the players who have defined a wild, brilliant NBA postseason
Whenever the stakes were highest culturally and politically, Popovich was the coach you could most count on notto stick to sports. During the NBA’s celebration of Black History Month in 2018, Popovich held forth on the subject of systemic racism and acknowledged his own white privilege. “If you were born white, you automatically have a monstrous advantage – educationally, economically, culturally, in this society,” he said. “It’s a tough one because people don’t really want to face it.”
Through it all, he maintained a wry sense of humor. When reporters questioned the Spurs’ losing streak in 2019, Popovich used it as an opportunity to indirectly criticize Trump. “Whoever started the rumor that we’re losing these games, it didn’t happen,” he joked. “It’s a witch-hunt. I see treasonous behavior. I see spies. They’re all sick.”
Popovich follows in a rich NBA coaching tradition of speaking out that started when Boston’s Red Auerbach used his considerable power to knock down barriers for Black players. And when Popovich began speaking out against Trump, he didn’t lack support from his peers. Stan Van Gundy, the former Detroit Pistons coach turned broadcaster, called out Trump’s “misleading” anthem protest attacks in a Time Magazine op-ed. Golden State’s Steve Kerr, a key player on two of Pop’s championship teams, echoes Popovich’s outrage on all things Trump and Trump-adjacent. Mike Budenholzer supported a player-led decision to boycott a 2020 playoff game in protest at the police shooting of Jacob Blake while coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, sparking a wave of walkoffs across US sports.
But where Van Gundy and Budenholzer are respected for their opinions outside the game because of their stature in it, and Kerr – whose father was murdered while serving as president of the American University of Beirut – is blood-bound to rebuke immorality in all its forms, it hits different when Popovich enters the chat because he comes from a background that chimes with many conservatives in America. Popovich played college basketball at the Air Force Academy in the 1960s and was the team’s captain and leading scorer his senior year. After graduating with a degree in Soviet studies and serving his required five years, he considered a career in the CIA before starting his coaching journey as an Air Force assistant in the early 1970s.
When Peter Holt bought the Spurs in 1993, one of his first moves was to bring back Popovich as general manager. (Pop got his NBA start with the Spurs in the late 80s, as the right hand to coaching legend Larry Brown.) Popovich helped realize the NBA’s global ambitions and organized his rosters around Frenchman Tony Parker, Argentina’s Manu Ginobili and Tim Duncan – a competitive swimmer from the US Virgin Islands who retired as the game’s greatest power forward.
Popovich’s coaching style wasn’t always appreciated in its heyday, before the current 3-and-D era took hold. Casual fans dismissed the Spurs’ dogmatically unselfish brilliance, the apogee of Brown’s play-the-right-way ethos, as a bore even as San Antonio piled up the victories – first with Naval Academy hero David Robinson, then Duncan, then perennial All-Star swingman Kawhi Leonard. And while Popovich was hard on his players – not least Duncan (who was frequently made an example of for the greater good) and may have cost himself more rings by losing his patience with Leonard (whose frequent injuries and sporadic availability proved frustrating), the coach’s compassion won out more often than not.
Stories abound of Pop’s personal touch. He might scold a reporter, Bill Belichick-style, but he also might help that same reporter land another job if his newspaper suddenly folded, or support another through his cancer fight. (Even a question as simple as How are you doing? might elicit a sincere response from Pop.) He was quick to wisecrack in his own huddle and break the tension on court. LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Steph Curry wouldn’t have started the league’s wine obsession without Popovich – the NBA’s king oenophile – breaking out his rare bottles for boozy Team USA dinners. (“He would always come around the table and tell everybody what the wine was that he was serving that evening,” Kerr said in a 2000 interview, recalling the Spurs team dinners. “It became a point of real connection between Pop and the players.”) Popovich liked to joke that the best wines in his collection were older than Victor Wembanyama, San Antonio’s current French phenom.
But during the team’s exhibition trip to Paris earlier this year, Wembanyama hosted the boozy team dinner while Popovich stayed back in the US to recover from a stroke that would eventually lead to his stepping down. After suffering another health scare last month, Popovich fully relinquished his coaching duties. As much as it smarts to not see him go for a sixth title with Wembanyama after keeping the Spurs fighting during fallow times, it just means Popovich can finally get to work on what would be his boldest statement yet: installing Becky Hammon as the NBA’s first female head coach.
Hammon, who was on Pop’s staff for seven seasons, has been dodging succession rumors for years. “My heart’s a little heavy for him because I know how much he loves it, but I’m sure he’ll crush this role just as much,” says Hammon, a championship-winning coach with the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces. “He’s a huge reason why I have this job.” (Don’t hold your breath on Hammon as the Spurs’ next coach, though: she went on to say she is “super happy” in the WNBA, but wouldn’t rule out a return to the NBA down the line.)
History will remember Popovich as one of sport’s all-time winners – the notable coach who beat super-squads built by Phil Jackson and Pat Riley. Meanwhile, the head coaching success of Hammon (two WNBA titles), Kerr (four NBA titles), and Budenholtzer (one, with Milwaukee in 2021) as well as former assistants Ime Udoka (Houston) and Will Hardy (Utah) speaks volumes to Pop’s wider impact in the game as a mentor. But Popovich’s ultimate legacy as a league statesman stands for all time and leaves a void that even Kerr, his chief envoy, will struggle to fill. But then again who knows if Kerr will even have to? While Popovich may be stepping back from the sideline, one expects his voice will still resonate simply because there’s no chance of him simply sticking to sports. Not with the stakes still so high.
