Reply With Quote
nice...and lets do it w/ style
Gregg Popovich knows when to chat with a player and when to scream at him. Few know this better than Tony Parker.
Popovich set to join 700 club
Jeff McDonald
This story, like most good stories, begins in a bar.
It was June 19, 2005, the morning of Game 5 of the NBA Finals. Spurs coach Gregg Popovich had convened his team — players, coaches, support staff — in an empty watering hole in suburban Detroit.
They were not there to drink away their troubles, although nobody would have blamed them if they tried. The Pistons had just walloped them in consecutive games, evening a series the Spurs commanded only a few days before.
Popovich had gathered his players simply to watch film of their previous performances against the Pistons, to pore over their mistakes, to talk, ad infinitum, about that night's game plan. Or so they thought.
Instead, as the lights dimmed, the video machine cued up old, grainy footage of assistant coach Brett Brown during his playing days at Boston University. He was wearing the shortest, tightest shorts imaginable.
“The players all fell out of their chairs laughing,” Popovich recalled. “When we couldn't laugh anymore, we packed up and left. That was it.”
The next day, the Spurs scored a 96-95 overtime victory in a pivotal Game 5, en route to their third of four NBA les. Popovich's film session wasn't solely responsible for winning that game — history will award Robert Horry the lion's share of credit — but it probably helped the Spurs avoid losing it before it even began.
“Pop is great at understanding a situation and what you need,” Spurs captain Tim Duncan said. “We didn't need any more pressure. We didn't need to learn any more about a team we'd already played a bunch of times.
“We just needed to be ready for the game.”
Tonight against Indiana, Popovich will take aim at his 700th NBA victory, an achievement that would cement his place in rare basketball company.
Only 15 coaches have preceded him beyond the velvet ropes of the 700 club. Only two — Hall of Famers Red Auerbach and Jerry Sloan — got there with one team.
Because it came in the playoffs, Game 5 against the Pistons doesn't count toward Popovich's official NBA victory total. Those who know him, however, say the Pop psychology on display in that Detroit tavern reveals the secret to his success.
It isn't just about Xs and Os.
“He has unbelievable people skills,” said Mike Budenholzer, Popovich's longest tenured assistant.
This might come as a surprise to some fans, who know Popovich only from his red-faced sideline tirades, or his occasionally stone-faced postgame interviews.
“He's got a great feel for people, when they need to be loved and when they need to be pushed,” Budenholzer said. “He knows how to pick his battles.”
Today, 13-plus seasons into a NBA head-coaching career most coaches would trade their favorite whistle for, Popovich still pushes. Not toward the number 700, which to him seems rather meaningless, but toward the number five.
As in, a fifth NBA championship.
“I feel a responsibility,” he says, “to get this team back to that level.”
Even after 699 wins and four les, Popovich, 60, remains fueled largely by fear. Not the fear of a pink slip, which hangs over so many of his professional contemporaries like a guillotine blade, but fear of something deeper and, in some ways, much more motivating.
“I don't have fear that my owner is going to fire me tomorrow,” Popovich said. “But I do have a fear of failure, like anybody else. We talk to the players about ‘appropriate fear' all the time. It's that nervousness in your belly that makes you want to watch more film or whatever it is.”
With the Spurs 13-10 and fighting for every inch of ground in the Western Conference, Popovich is too preoccupied at present to contemplate his expanding place in NBA immortality.
“I still feel like I'm a Division-III coach,” said the former head man at Pomona-Pitzer College in California. “You think about the four championships and wonder, ‘Did that really happen?' Beyond that, I'm a Division-III coach at heart.”
Popovich famously attributes his success — the wins and the les — to the lucky lottery pingpong ball that in 1997 gave him Duncan.
“I just tried not to screw it up,” Popovich said this week, dusting off a stock line.
His contemporaries won't let him off so easily, because a lesser coach very well might have screwed it up.
“You have to be a of a coach to get four championships,” Phoenix coach Alvin Gentry said. “Everybody talks about the players, but you've still got to coach the players.”
Or, as Popovich once proved in a vacant Detroit pub, know when not to coach them. Thanks to him, one of the biggest victories in Spurs history will be forever linked with a grown man in ill-fitting shorts.
“I have to admit,” Duncan said, contemplating the memory again this week, “Brett Brown did look good in those shorts.”
Exclusive company
With 699 regular-season wins, Gregg Popovich is poised to become the 16th coach in NBA history with 700 or more (through Thursday’s games, active in bold):
1,332 Lenny Wilkens
1,316 Don Nelson
1,210 Pat Riley
1,152 Jerry Sloan
1,061 Phil Jackson
1,055 Larry Brown
952 George Karl
944 Bill Fitch
938 Red Auerbach
935 Motta
874 Rick Adelman
864 Jack Ramsay
832 Cotton Fitzsimmons
784 Gene Shue
707 John MacLeod
Note: Popovich would be just the third 700-game winner with one team, joining Sloan and Auerbach.
Source: Basketball- reference.com
Last edited by duncan228; 12-19-2009 at 01:07 AM.
nice...and lets do it w/ style
Great article
Ah, the good kind of 700 Club, not...
Pop
I wish Pop would stay to win 1000 games but that'll take about 5 more years at 55 wins per year.
why dont they mentioned the losses?
lenny wilkens doesnt have a good w/l ratio either...
wow nellie could pass wilkens and be the winningest coach in nba history this year or next
Credit where credit is due - well done McDonald, great article.
I googled but I couldn't find a pic of said tight shorts
Congrats Pop!
700th win was a memorable one. Thanks Pop. Hope you stay for 700 more.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
