There was once a time when you could say just about anything and the reach of that (probably) silly sentiment wouldn’t go very far. For better or worse your hot sport opinion was limited to listening range. Perhaps you were around when Red Grange was running over and around people and you wanted to say “You know what? He isn’t that good when you think about it.” Perhaps the people in your immediate vicinity of section 101 would have heard it and maybe thrown some popped corn at your head or something. This was the limit of your hot take.
Now, we are all blessed and cursed with the ability to broadly cast our thoughts and opinions to the ends of the earth. You literally can record your likeness and voice with smaller effort than it took generations of people to find sips of water in the morning for millennia. The quality of said recording will be better than anything possible for all of recorded history to this moment. You can say the stupidest things like “Pop isn’t a good coach” and people will have to experience this folly while playing with their children. It is truly incredible.
This week on Gilbert Arenas1’ show Rashad McCants said Pop wasn’t a good coach. Kenyon Martin, and Gil both argued with him and the internet had much fun with the whole thing.
To be fair, there was a time when I thought Pop was a bad coach. He was losing, after having fired Bob Hill — who was clearly only losing because David Robinson and Sean Elliott were injured. What I didn’t know as a 10-year old kid was that Pop had long thought the team needed more defensive discipline, more toughness, and more organization offensively beyond “give it to Dave”. I couldn’t possibly see the fuller vision.
Even then, there was a point after drafting Tim Duncan where the Spurs were losing and were a weekend away from Pop being fired. The team was healthy and had the franchise star and yet it wasn’t quite clicking in the early season. You might argue that players saved him, and ultimately were the bulk of the reason Pop won so much. Pop, at his HOF speech, agrees with this. He has long said the reason he has had so much success was that the stars and other hall-of-famers allowed him to coach them. Pop has never scored a point for the Spurs, folks.
Coaching is about making individuals better, helping teams reach their potential, and generally being better than a collection of individuals. Pop has done so, at a hall-of-fame level.
This was McCants’ main point: “where were the wins without the HOFers?” The answer for the learned observer is that there were never going to be a lot of wins in this tank-fest, and the Spurs were still playing as a team, as a unit, and generally working hard for each other.
McCants was a good player. As an NBA guy, he was fairly run-of-the-mill. Ten points per game over a five-year career is decent, but nothing noteworthy as far as the history of the league. We can respect his basketball talent, but not necessarily his opinions on what makes a great coach. He won in college, but not in the league.
Once someone gets to the absolute highest level of competition, the gap between tiers is tremendous. McCants, a middling NBA guy, is a better hooper than the vast majority of the entire nation — even probably the world. But in the small community of NBA talent, he cannot get in a game right now. It is incredible.
I don’t know that the tiers of head coaching are similar, but the ability to deal with the personalities and challenges of leading a team of men that can compete at that highest level of competition is unique. Basketball is basketball, but it is quite a different matter to convince college kids to go to class and play good defense against NC State than it is to find a way to win against a LeBron James.
In the kinds of conversations we all have in comparing coaches — Pop vs Phil, for example — we sometimes forget that the ability to navigate the things beyond the strategies are the most important thing. Phil was great because he could get Mike Jordan to buy in just a little bit. Pop was great because he could get Timmy, Tony and Manu to continue to buy in, to believe that subsuming their egos within this group would be a winning strategy.
Perhaps the best compliment to Pop was something that was used against him in those barbershop arguments: he never won back-to-back. Most teams have a peak, and win a couple or a few and then fade away. The Spurs under Pop, had two eras — the 1999-2007 years, in which they won four titles, but never repeated. Then the 2013-2017 years, in which the team was even less reliant on one star (save for the latter Kawhi-centric years) and won a title, but did make back-to-back Finals.
Pop, and the Spurs organization that he has been a part of, have made a big dea lof moving slowly and deliberately and not overreacting. Get swept by Kobe in the Dome in 2001? Run it back. Get eliminated in 2002? Run it back. Mavs steal a win in 2006 in Game 7 on your home floor? Come back again and win it in 2007.
A lot of credit goes to the team and players but a lot of it can be credited to the head coach, who preached process and not results, and playing the right way. The team believed they were doing things the right way and so could stick with their system and methods. They looked at what they were doing and made tweaks and adjustments unlike other coaches (Phil). Pop doesn’t call 4-down 800 times a game anymore, he lets his guys run a bit more and shoot threes even though he hates them. You can still share the ball and go good-to-great while shooting 30-3pointers a night. You can still play hard, and be a good teammate and good human being even if you have an off shooting night. Those are Pop things, and he is a hall of famer not only because he preaches those things, but because he was able to get the best of the best to buy in for so long and do a lot of winning.
Gilbert Arenas, aka Agent Zero has had a second life as a hot sports opinion haver on the internet.