Finger: Old Spurs Making Their Mark

[duncan228]

Old Spurs making their mark
Mike Finger

The NBA long has been littered with Spurs alumni, and when one of them won a coach of the year award last month, Gregg Popovich admitted there's a downside.

“Once trained,” Popovich said after former assistant Mike Brown was honored for his work as head coach of the Cavaliers, “it is hard sometimes to watch them go away.”

Then there are those who were never trained at all. While Brown channels his inner Pop and leads the postseason's only undefeated team, the two coaches who best encapsulate this year's frenetic, new-era playoffs are guys who also have silver-and-black roots.

George Karl and Vinny Del Negro were Spurs, all right. Just like Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.

The meanings of some descriptions have a way of evolving over the years, and few illustrate that better than Karl and Del Negro. Both made a name for themselves in San Antonio, and both did it before the Spurs had developed the reputation for which they'd eventually become famous.

Karl, whose Nuggets await a Western Conference finals opponent, learned a few things here as one of the original Spurs in the 1970s, but it had little to do with championships and even less to do with defense. He was a favorite of the Baseline Bums when the bums were still on the baseline, and although he was known for his hustle, many of his gutsy plays came for a team that gave up 114 points per game.

Del Negro, too, had his San Antonio moments, but it was a stretch when, after he was hired to take over the Bulls, some looked at his Spurs pedigree and assumed he was another Popovich disciple. He played only a season and a half with Popovich as his head coach, and both men would admit they didn't have the closest player-coach relationship in the history of NBA locker rooms.

Del Negro, like Karl, was a Spur before the Spurs found their trademark, something Doc Rivers joked about during the Celtics' seven-game, seven-overtime first-round survival against the Bulls.

“I used to call him kerosene, because whenever I was put in, I had to put out the fire that he started with a guy,” Rivers told reporters. “He was getting torched.”

Last summer in Chicago, more than a few feared Del Negro would get torched again in his first coaching job. One columnist wrote he'd “broken through that glass ceiling for people with no experience in fields they want to work in,” and another greeted his hiring with the summary, “No flash. No substance. Nothing.”

That likely changed with the Bulls' postseason performance, in which their wild, take-every-shot, un-Spurs-like approach made them one of the biggest stories of the playoffs even in defeat.

But not even Del Negro has been redeemed as much as Karl, who has managed to achieve both job security and gravitas in the matter of a few weeks. For all his regular-season victories and all his entertaining banter, Karl's legacy has largely been playoff failure and off-court drama.

He'd lost in the first round in seven of his last eight postseason appearances before this year, and his bickering with star players had become so routine that a Denver columnist wrote earlier this spring, “a crisis never seems more than a cloudy day away from Karl. But is it ever his fault?”

Now, with his team on a roll and a legitimate chance to beat whoever comes next, Karl will get some credit. And when he does?

Some will remember he was a Spur. Back before anyone even knew what that meant.

[stxspurs]

WOW i was just talking to a friend about all the spur player and personnel in the nba...crazy.

[Avitus1]

Silver and Black goes deep in the NBA. I've actually mentioned both of these things during the course of the playoffs.

[duncan228]

There was a similar piece in December.

Pop's tree bears fruit

http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=111655

[50Bestspurever]

I always associtate Karl with the supersonics before the spurs.

[lefty]

Old Spurs?

So Spurs