Kawhi Leonard is Gregg Popovich’s greatest Accomplishment

[cariocaz]

A fun read: (On what I have discovered is a good site.)

http://www.todaysfastbreak.com/nba-west/san-antonio-spurs/scaletta-kawhi-leonard-gregg-popovichs-greatest-accomplishment/

[spursistan]

Gregg Popovich is a pretty accomplished coach, but Kawhi Leonard may be his greatest work yet.

:lmao..

Still getting more credit than he deserves..Similar with Timmy :lol..

[Chris]

'He's alive! He's alive!'

[Russ]

:lmao..

Still getting more credit than he deserves..Similar with Timmy :lol..

Agree that Pop gets more credit than he deserves for Duncan.

But Kawhi is the closest thing to a test-tube created star in basketball history.

Pop and the Spurs literally went into the lab and created him.

I agree with the article's observations below:


What Pop received was a valuable, hard-working lump of clay with tremendous potential. And what he did with that is help Leonard become the best possible player he could be, and one who has forced his way into “best player” conversation. Year by year, Leonard has improved, and Pop has been there to help him along.

But unlike Duncan, who was going to be a franchise great wherever he went, with Leonard maybe not every coach would know how to speak to him, or more importantly, how to hear a man who barely talks. This is Pop’s doing as well.

He saw greatness in that lump of clay. And in the Spurs’ first regular-season game without their greatest franchise player in two decades, the future was there, ready to carry on the tradition in the image of both Pop and Duncan.

[midnightpulp]

I love Pop, despite his flaws, but one fuckin' thing I'm tired of hearing about across all sports is this pontificating about "systems" and the pumping up of the myth that head coaches can make or break a team. Maybe in the NFL, but in every other sport, the head coach has been proven to not make that much of a difference.


Our most surprising finding was that most of the coaches in our data set did not have
a statistically significant impact on player performance relative to a generic coach. Even
the most successful coaches by our metric—Jackson, Popovich, and Fitzsimmons—
were statistically discernable only from the very worst-rated coaches. We therefore find
little evidence that most coaches in the NBA are more than the “principal clerks” that
Adam Smith claimed managers were more than 200 years ago.

https://usatthebiglead.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/ijsf4-2coachingpaper.pdf

[CGD]

The work with reclamation/raw talent players like Green, Hill, and Cojo is just as impressive

[GSH]

But unlike Duncan, who was going to be a franchise great wherever he went, with Leonard maybe not every coach would know how to speak to him, or more importantly, how to hear a man who barely talks. This is Pop’s doing as well.


Pretty sure Kawhi didn't think he was a star, or that he was going to be. The first thing Pop had to do was convince Kawhi.