Gregg Popovich: The Secret Behind the Greatest NBA Coach

Gregg Popovich is in nowdays recognized as one of the best, if not the best coach in NBA history. Gregg Popovich might actually be remembered as the best general manager of one NBA club. Yes, in history. As the GM of San Antonio in 1996, in his second year of tenure, he fired coach Bob Hill and appointed himself as the coach. Isn’t it the general manager’s job to select the best possible coach?

It was truly a decision that changed both San Antonio Spurs and NBA basketball.

Although Gregg Popovich himself would never say something like that about himself.

Whenever asked, he would credit his coaching success to the players. And he did it in his Hall of Fame enshriment speech.

Gregg Popovich Origins

According to a story from his Academy colleagues, once upon entering a dormitory, he asked his roommate: “Do you know who started World War I?” The roommate said, “A Serb who killed Austrian Archduke Ferdinand.”

“Yes, and I’m the crazy Serb,” replied Popovich, and so the story of the “crazy Serb” was born.

In an anecdote shared with one Serbian magazine (“Nedeljnik) by Igor Kokoskov, the first “real” Serbian head coach of an NBA team. When Kokoskov told Popovich, “You are a good coach because you are Serbian,” Popovich – who loves to counter – replied, “I’m Montenegrin and not a good coach, but I have Tim Duncan on my team.”

Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr absorbed a lot of basketball knowledge working with Gregg Popovich during his years in San Antonio as a player, and as an assistent in US National team.

“Pop can sometimes get easily fired up. Pop says he becomes Serbian, that’s his phrase. ‘When the Serbian in me kicks in, watch out…,’” Kerr recounted.

Who Gregg Popovich Really Is?

Popovich can be a difficult person.

Those who know him and those who have only seen him on television know this.

In the show-business world of NBA basketball, there is no participant who is so closed off, yet so honest.

Every grumpy statement he makes to the media – when he responds to reporters’ energetic questions with disinterested “no” or “yes” – and consistently letting them know how much he is irritated by the meaningless but showbiz-essential halftime interviews, is, as a contrast to the usual smiles and clichés.

From Gregg Popovich, the public can expect anything but clichés. And the answer to the one question: who Gregg Popovich really is.

When American journalists inquire with his friends, they usually learn only superficial things – he likes to watch cooking shows, for example. He likes to watch avant-garde films and read presidential biographies.

Serbian media learned from his Belgrade friends – he loves lamb, but it must be well-roasted and fresh off the spit.

Gregg Popovich Connections With Europe

He has often said that he “stole” some tactical ideas from european coaches like Dušan Duda Ivković and Željko Obradović.

Duda Ivković said once that Popovich is a man of a rare emotional intelligence. Žarko Paspalj, former San Antonio player whom Popovich helped a lot when he recently suffered a stroke in America, said of Gregg hjat it is a man “sent by a God.”

He was born in East Chicago, Indiana – right next to Gary, a place symbolic for Serbian immigrants, mainly industrial workers in steel mills and proud members of the American lower middle class.

Gregg Popovich: A “spy” who coached me

As a coach, before Larry Brown invited him to be an assistant in San Antonio, he matured in the team of the military academy he graduated from and at Pomona-Pitzer (two small colleges in California, they have a joint basketball team).

Gregg Popovich is known as a man whose mind holds interests far beyond this magical game. He often starts practices with a history question, for example, in which country were the Boer Wars fought, or about the current world situation, who won some elections being held at that time…

And this man, who enjoys debates as much as the final seconds of a close basketball game, has one red line, one topic he will never discuss with anyone. And that topic is Gregg Popovich.

In the early 1990s, Gregg Popovich was the best man at the wedding of the aforementioned Larry Brown, who brought him as an assistant. And Brown once told the Washington Post he couldn’t remember a conversation where Popovich talked about himself. His friend from his early coaching days, with whom he was an assistant at the “Air Force” basketball team and traveled a lot searching for talents, realized that the best way to have a conversation with him was not to mention him.

“We talked about God, religion, those are personal things. But never about his childhood. Those are just not topics,” said professor Koblik, history professor at Pomona, who served as a kind of academic advisor to the basketball team.

There is a gap in his career of three years after he graduated. He was “somewhere” for three years and then returned to college and became an assistant coach.

“I thought he was a spy,” said Pomona player Dan Dargan. “You enroll in a military academy and speak Russian, and then disappear for a few years? Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. No one knows,” he said.

Of course, he was far from being James Bond. Part of that period was spent in American bases in Europe, where he translated from Russian.

Gregg Popovich and public image

And he never cared what people thought and said about him. When he took over the team as coach in 1996, San Antonio was at the bottom. At the end of that season, the local San Antonio Express-News conducted a survey in which 93 percent of respondents wanted him off the bench.

He didn’t cater to the media or the public. For the first two years, he faced stories of dismissal, and in 1999, he was on the verge of being fired, and then followed the season in which San Antonio won its first NBA championship.

“As far as the public is concerned, he was public enemy number 1 until around 2003. The 1999 championship didn’t change much,” said San Antonio GM Buford.

The son of a Serb and a Croatian, a hippie who went to a military college, a secretive man who will openly tell you everything to your face, a public figure who doesn’t care what the public thinks about him… Gregg Popovich is the best-kept secret of American basketball and a repository of contrasts and contradictions that created the most powerful basketball philosophy.