The night Gregg Popovich finally lost his patience

As his team headed into the All-Star break following its 14th consecutive loss, the Spurs' coach left it with some words to remember.

Photo courtesy of Bally Sports Southwest

It’s not that Gregg Popovich doesn’t get angry anymore, it’s just that a healthier relationship with life’s perspectives has molded for him a calmer form of being. He’s said the old days were “a phase” he’s happy to let stay in the past, and now, few and far between are the camera shots of a red-faced coach stomping onto the court to make clear the assignments missed or to pounce harshly on lackluster effort. After all, he’s teaching a group of kids that, for the most part, haven’t given him reason to lose his patience.

But following his team’s fourteenth consecutive loss last week, a record-setting streak of futility for the franchise, a switch seemed to have been flipped. Pop stopped short of calling the Spurs’ 120-110 dud against the Charlotte Hornets last Wednesday “pathetic” (his go-to description of poor showings over the years) because proper perspective wouldn’t allow it. But the canned answers he’s often given this season — variations of ‘We made this mistake and that mistake, but they’re learning, and I’m proud of the guys’ effort’ — were replaced by direct criticism, with no age-related caveats.

“Yeah they’re young, and blah blah blah, but that ‘young’ thing is getting old,” he said. “It’s the same mistakes — giving up middle, not blocking out, not getting back in transition, that sort of thing. Just inexcusable. Youth’s got nothing to do with it.”

It may sound weird to some, but winning has never been the top priority for Popovich, even when his teams were doing a lot of it. He’s often said, in some form or another, he cares more about effort, execution and making the next best play, and from there the chips will fall as they may. So it wasn’t the longest losing streak the Spurs have ever experienced that had him irritated. Hell, there’s a good chance he wasn’t even aware they’d just established the new low. Pop tends to not care about such things.

But he does grow tired of the lip service, and of the status quo when it’s only doing harm. San Antonio continues to make the same mistakes over and over again despite regularly acknowledging the need to address them, and the effects of those errors have only been compounded by the departures of Josh Richardson, Stanley Johnson and Jakob Poeltl, who had been the longest-tenured Spur on the roster before being shipped back to Toronto at the trade deadline. A team already short on experience just lost another heap of it, and still, Pop is no longer interested in the excuse machine.

The team’s record is what it is, and right where many projected it would be when San Antonio moved Dejounte Murray last summer and made no subsequent deals or impactful free-agent signings. It was scheduled to go for it come draft season, and it’s still very much on time. But what’s been most startling is the historically terrible defense the Spurs have displayed on a nightly basis. And it isn’t that anyone expected San Antonio to defend well — teams that drop to the very bottom of the standings rarely do that — but a Popovich-coached group being repeatedly shredded to the degree it has is not the type of precedent the Spurs were looking to set.

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Striking the right balance this season was always going to be difficult. While it’s been veiled by actual injuries and the very real inexperience of youth, there’s no pretending the assignment was ever anything other than what it is: San Antonio was never going to let itself win too many games this season, however you’d like to define that. But the team had also genuinely stressed the all-important goal of preparing its current roster for the future. There’s room for losing competitively, and while the Spurs have certainly grown both individually and as a group, their failure to find any semblance of defensive consistency has been as glaring as any improvement or positive development.

“At some point you have to take pride in what you’re doing execution-wise, and competitively. That starts with defense, and we really suck,” Popovich said. “When I think we’re starting to improve on it, we go back two steps. That’s something I’m going to have to think about and figure out how I’m going to be able to motivate them better, to make them understand that they have to take pride in that.

“We have NO ONE on the basketball team who sets the example for anybody else at the defensive end,” he stressed firmly. “Then if it bleeds into not blocking out and giving up second chance points … you’re hurting.”

And that’s Pop’s cue, from his own mouth if not from anyone else’s. The 74-year-old is often peppered with questions from visiting media, or while the Spurs are on the road, seeking answers as to how he still has the passion to do this job with players more than 50 years his junior. He’ll generally entertain that curiosity from the same reporters a time or two, but rarely more. In his mind it’s borderline insulting, especially if he continues to be asked to repeat himself.

Throughout it all Pop’s answers have remained consistent: The day he stops being demanding of his players is the day he’ll know it’s time to hang up the whistle, and to this point there’s been no indication he’s lost interest. He may not coach with the same outward ferocity of years past, but Pop is still watching intensely. The jabs are more subtle — in the huddle during a timeout, in the locker room, or during lengthy “educational” film sessions — but he’s still throwing them.

It’s a different NBA these days, and the old coach isn’t out there trying to cave in the heads of teenagers and twenty-somethings the Spurs are taking “back to the drawing board” to try and sculpt. But even considering San Antonio’s ultimate mission during the buildup for Wembypalooza, it seems Popovich is only willing to give so much rope before the clamps are applied. And if there is to be a different approach, it won’t simply be a new test for his players, but a chance to see for himself if he’s still cut out for this kind of thing.

There’s a fiery version of Pop still burning in there, and the final stretch of this season may provide more insight as to exactly how much it can still be brought to the surface for a team (and for different reasons, a front office) that isn’t yet ready to win. There isn’t a scenario in which he mails it in, nor is there one in which he revisits the days of his near-criminal treatment of a young Tony Parker. But there is a scenario in which he ratchets up the intensity in an effort to avoid taking this group into the summer months riding its current performative state, no matter the status of his future on the sidelines. Pop has expressed his desire to leave this team in its best possible condition by the time he’s ready to leave — however far off that day might be — and there’s still a whole lot of conditioning to be done.

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Following his brief, two-game sabbatical for a minor medical procedure in early December, players spoke of Pop’s energetic return with a sense of surprise in their voices. He’d come back with new packages to install offensively and a fresh batch of game tape to burn through with his team, as if he’d spent his entire recuperation period in a cage with nary a fix for his hoops addiction. Pop is still the same “sick puppy” he’s always been, and if his past is any indication, he’s going to be on fire by the time everyone is back from vacation this week.

“I want them to enjoy themselves during the break, be with their loved ones and that sort of thing,” Pop said. “But I want to take a little time, and I want it to hurt a little bit as far as feeling a little sorry for themselves because they’re losing games. You don’t want to lose, start playing some defense.”

Some defense — any defense — would be great, and for Pop, so would an end to the lip service. Now, with a team that’s even younger than the one that initially set off on the nine-game Rodeo Road Trip, it may be up to him to ensure his players understand the entirety of what this team is trying to accomplish.

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