The coach is stepping away from a role in which he won five championships with the Spurs. He will be hard to replace, on and off the court<\/p>\n
Raise a glass to Gregg Popovich, the gruff teddy bear who lifted the San Antonio Spurs into the NBA\u2019s elite. After three decades on the Spurs\u2019 sideline, he is stepping back from coaching<\/a> to become the team\u2019s president of basketball operations. It\u2019s a back-to-the-future move for the 76-year-old: he was the Spurs\u2019 general manager for eight years before he became the team\u2019s coach. (\u201cI\u2019m no longer the coach, I\u2019m El Jefe,\u201d Popovich jokingly declared<\/a> this week before unveiling a T-shirt with that Spanish title.) Altogether, Pop won five NBA championships from 1999 through 2014, a run that puts him among the greatest coaches in league history. But when it came to being the NBA\u2019s unflinching statesman, he was in a league all by himself.<\/p>\n Popovich wasn\u2019t just the NBA\u2019s backbone. He was, perhaps, the most fearless truth teller in all of sport. Certainly no one was bolder when it came to taking on Donald Trump \u2013 whom Popovich has described<\/a> as a \u201csoulless coward,\u201d a \u201cpathological liar\u201d and a \u201cderanged idiot\u201d. Popovich told beat reporters<\/a> he was \u201csick to my stomach\u201d after Trump\u2019s 2016 presidential election win, a tipping point he likened to the fall of Rome. He slammed<\/a> Steve Bannon\u2019s appointment as chief White House strategist as a fear-mongering exercise. During the Spurs\u2019 2017 media day, Popovich launched into a 21-minute condemnation of Trump<\/a> and the Maga movement after the president attacked NFL players and Nascar\u2019s Bubba Wallace for their national anthem protests. \u201cOur country is an embarrassment to the world,\u201d Popovich said. \u201cThis is an individual that when people held arms during games, [he thought] that they were doing it to [dis]honor the flag. That\u2019s delusional. But it\u2019s what we have to live with.\u201d<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The coach is stepping away from a role in which he won five championships with the Spurs. He will be hard to replace, on and off the court Raise a glass to Gregg Popovich, the gruff teddy bear who lifted the San Antonio Spurs into the NBA\u2019s elite. After three decades on the Spurs\u2019 sideline, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}