“I can read people pretty quickly,’’ Gregg Popovich once said. "Who is full of themselves? Who has gotten over themselves? Who is altruistic and who is not?”
That isn’t to say the longtime San Antonio Spurs head coach enforced a specific way of being—after all, he’d gotten the most out of players as lawful good as David Robinson and as chaotic good as Manu Ginobili; as lawful evil as Bruce Bowen and as true neutral as Kawhi Leonard. Pop understood the mosaic of team dynamics as well as any coach could. The pieces make up the whole. And with time, dedication, discipline, and whatever other methods-to-madness Popovich has kept private over nearly three decades of NBA brilliance, the whole becomes a monolith.
When Stephon Castle, the 2025 Rookie of the Year, posed for a photo earlier this week alongside past Spurs rookies of the year David Robinson, Tim Duncan, and Victor Wembanyama, it was a heartening visual of the Spurs organization’s true cultural fabric woven across time. It’s a dense weave. For most teams, making cross-generational comparisons can feel like a ham-fisted narrative construction. For the Spurs, the way history folds upon itself anew—the way Wemby simply is Duncan’s spiritual sequel—almost feels like part of the grander scheme. It is a testament to the methods by which Popovich has instilled flow, both in offensive scheme over the decades and in the way we conceive of players within San Antonio’s auspices. Links in a chain, distinct but indivisible. To reference any one player’s greatness is to reference every player alongside him and before him. The Spurs have never been dynastic in their leaguewide influence, and in the late stages of Popovich’s coaching career, they weren’t even convincingly competitive. But they’ve been a standard-bearer of continuity and forward thinking in one form or another for as long as Pop has sat along that sideline.
Now, the monolith enters a new era. Popovich has transitioned from the head coaching position he’s held for the past 29 years back to the front office, where he will serve as San Antonio’s president of basketball operations. "While my love and passion for the game remain, I’ve decided it’s time to step away as head coach," Popovich said in a statement Friday. "I’m forever grateful to the wonderful players, coaches, staff and fans who allowed me to serve them as the Spurs head coach and am excited for the opportunity to continue to support the organization, community and city that are so meaningful to me."
The transition makes logical sense to ease the physical tolls of the job, giving Popovich, 76, fewer high-pressure day-to-day responsibilities without sacrificing his all-important voice. Mitch Johnson, who served as interim head coach this season in Popovich’s absence due to a stroke last November, has been named the franchise’s 18th official head coach. Johnson was a member of Popovich's coaching staff for the past six seasons. Pop’s successor was always going to come in-house; there just wasn’t any way of knowing when that time would come. Popovich steps away from the sideline as the winningest coach in NBA history, with 1,422 regular-season wins. Among coaches with at least 20 years of experience, his win-loss percentage is bested only by Phil Jackson, Red Auerbach, and Pat Riley. He’s won five NBA titles. He’s produced 19 50-win seasons—more than any other coach. He is right up there with John Wooden as the greatest basketball coach ever. He’s a living legend, and he couldn’t care less about the acclaim—announcing the end of an iconic head coaching run in a Friday-afternoon news dump is Peak Pop.
"Do what you do, do it well, and do it with passion. But do not worry about plaudits or condemnation, because both are going to come your way,” Popovich has said. “Whether you’re the manager of the local McDonald’s, the coach at Pomona or Phil Jackson with the Chicago Bulls, you are going to get plaudits and you are going to get condemnation and they’re both false notions. You need to care about how you do your work and how you treat your family and friends. Nothing else matters.”
The NBA is a player’s league, through and through, yet for much of this century getting past the Spurs really meant getting past Popovich. In a recent episode of Mind the Game, LeBron James and Steve Nash went deep while slumped in lounge chairs, laughing and reminiscing in solidarity about the traumas they’d faced competing against Popovich in the 2000s. “When you play the Spurs, not only are you trying to defeat the Hall of Fame players, you’re also trying to defeat the Hall of Fame coach,” LeBron said, before Nash cut him off, exasperated: “Can I stop you there for a second? Like, was Pop a spy?” As Nash went on a wink-wink conspiratorial spiel, the cameras focused on LeBron’s hand emptying a bottle of wine into his glass.
Before LeBron could ever win a championship, he had to get swept by the Spurs in the 2007 Finals. Before the Shaq-Kobe Lakers could become the last team to “three-peat,” they had to get swept by the Spurs in the second round in 1999, during San Antonio’s first-ever championship run. Mike D’Antoni, one of the most influential offensive minds in modern basketball, has never beaten Popovich in a playoff series, losing five different matchups from 2005 to 2017 across three different teams (Suns, Lakers, Rockets). I’ve argued that Steph Curry’s first true star-making moment happened during Game 1 of the Warriors’ second-round matchup against the Spurs in 2013, when Steph scored 44 points in 57(!) minutes … in a losing effort.
Losing to Popovich is no indignity; it is a rite of passage. The most iconic figures in basketball over the past quarter century have run up against the Spurs and failed before reaching the heights they were meant to reach. Trying to crack Popovich’s code in a best-of-seven series seemingly does something to a star’s brain chemistry. Pop is one of basketball’s ultimate teachers, whether you’re on his team or not.
For years, Popovich turned the in-game and postgame interviews into a sort of David Blaine performance art, displaying his anguish at the inconvenience for all to see. He couldn’t bear to suffer through inane softball questions. He was sensitive, but not in the fragile way—his mind seemingly calibrated to give things he cared about an appropriate weight. Anything that made those exchanges to be more or less than what they were became unpalatable. If there was ever a time we got an unfettered glimpse into Pop’s philosophy, it came in a 34-minute lecture he gave at a FIBA coaching clinic about a decade ago. A “magician’s secrets revealed” from the GOAT that somehow has fewer than 700,000 views.
“There's no magic,” Popovich told those in attendance. “I don't have any secret plays and if I had one, then 400 people would have the same play. It's about organization, it's about discipline, it's about building the blocks, about relationships with your players. How do you get something out of somebody who's selfish or doesn't really compete the way you would like or so on and so forth. All those things, I think, have more to do with winning and losing than being able to draw a certain kind of play.”
Popovich always saw the bigger picture. That clarity of vision and principle served him well across more than four decades in the Spurs organization. As the 76-year-old transitions into a familiar role as lead front office decision-maker, he’ll have the pleasure of figuring out the most enviable situation in basketball today: How to best build around the most talented young basketball player the game has ever seen. It’s a departure in one sense, but in another, nothing much has changed in the Spurs organization. Pop has always been more than just a coach. He is San Antonio’s guiding light.
