Appreciation: Gregg Popovich had a view of the world, and it changed both the Spurs and the NBA

Gregg Popovich understood the world.

That goes back long before the basketball world knew who he was. It probably can be traced to at least Popovich's time at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he majored in Soviet studies and was on his way to becoming a spy.

He became an icon instead.

Popovich's time as coach of the San Antonio Spurs ended Friday, six months after a stroke essentially ended his tenure — in that capacity, anyway — without him knowing it. He stepped down, Mitch Johnson was promoted from acting coach to head coach, and just like that, the Spurs started a new chapter.

Popovich isn't going anywhere. He's still the team president. He'll be around. He'll have influence. His role going forward is probably largely up to him, a right that he's earned over the last 30 or so years. His view of the world shaped many of the things that the Spurs are today. Same goes for the rest of the league as well, and as proof, look at any roster these days.

Some of the best players in the game — Nikola Jokic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Luka Doncic, Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Spurs' own franchise player in Victor Wembanyama among them — were born outside the United States. Would they have been in the league without Popovich? Almost certainly, yes. But did Popovich and the Spurs help create the path that saw more international players get into the league? Most definitely.

“They were a pioneer around the international game,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said of the Spurs — specifically Popovich and his longtime right-hand man, team CEO R.C. Buford — earlier this year. “They were scouting internationally in a deep way long before many other teams.”

Basketball is played all over the world, and Popovich — forever the student — wanted to learn about all of it. He was finding players in Europe in the late 1980s, long before it became common. As the stories go, Popovich still can't walk around places like Belgrade without being recognized. That's probably not much of an exaggeration, either.

Just look at the roster of all-time Spurs greats: France’s Tony Parker and Argentina’s Manu Ginobili formed one of the league’s all-time Big Threes with Tim Duncan — another player whose view of the world was perhaps a bit different, having grown up in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Boris Diaw, Tiago Splitter, Marco Belinelli, Beno Udrih, Jakob Poeltl, Fabricio Oberto, Pau Gasol and many more were part of the Spurs program as well. Popovich had international coaches — Italy's Ettore Messina made big headlines in Europe when he joined the Spurs, for example. And Popovich picked the brains of others when he was coaching the U.S. national team, including former French national team coach (and Wembanyama's coach) Vincent Collet, someone he went head-to-head with for Olympic gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021.

“There are smart people everywhere,” Popovich once said, around the time he was taking over as the U.S. coach. “None of us has it all figured out. Everybody brings something to the table that you might not have thought about.”

If anyone came close to having it all figured out, it was Popovich.

He's a Basketball Hall of Famer. The NBA's all-time win leader. A five-time champion with the Spurs. Coached the U.S. to Olympic gold. And that's just the stuff everybody knows about. Ask the people who operate the San Antonio Food Bank what Popovich has quietly done for them and the answers will take a while. Same goes for the Innocence Project and St. Jude's Children's Hospital, two other causes he supports.

Popovich was more than a coach. He was a guy from Indiana who could shoot the ball well and was smart, parlayed that into an Air Force education, should have made the 1972 U.S. Olympic team as a player, took some of the disappointment from that and began learning how to coach instead, took over a Division III team in California that had lost 88 consecutive conference games and turned it into a champion, kept climbing the ladder and here we are.

The Air Force Academy — a place he would return to many times after his graduation — taught him countless lessons, including to embrace different views and to never stop evolving.

“What you learn there is to get over yourself,” Popovich said. “It’s not about you.”

He never stopped learning, either. He changed the Spurs. Changed the NBA, too. Forget the championships and records and one-liners and everything else. Popovich helped change the NBA.

That's his legacy.

FILE - In this Feb. 28, 2015, file photo, San Antonio Spurs forward Tim Duncan, left, and head coach Gregg Popovich chat on the bench during the first quarter of an NBA basketball game against the Phoenix Suns in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri, File)

FILE - San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich directs his team during in the fourth quarter of an NBA basketball game against the New Orleans Hornets in San Antonio, Wednesday, April 15, 2009. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

FILE - In this June 14, 2014, file photo, San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich smiles as a question is asked during a news conference for the NBA basketball finals in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File)

FILE - United States players put a gold medal on head coach Gregg Popovich during the men's basketball medal ceremony at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Saturday, Aug. 7, 2021, in Tokyo, Japan. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)

FILE - San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich smiles during the NBA basketball team's media day, Monday, Sept. 27, 2021, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — England's managing director of men's cricket Rob Key says he will investigate the drinking habits of the England team following reports that their mid-Ashes beach resort break may have involved over-indulging of alcohol.

England lost each of the first three tests to allow Australia to retain the Ashes in just 11 days of on-field action.

The England squad visited the resort town of Noosa on the Sunshine Coach north of Brisbane between the second and third tests, a long-planned part of the itinerary designed to help players relax and unwind on the long tour.

Key, who did not join the players in Noosa, said he had no problem with the break, but would not be happy if he found evidence of over-indulging.

“If there’s things where people are saying that our players went out and drank excessively, then of course we’ll be looking into that,” he said Tuesday in Melbourne, where the fourth test begins Friday.

“Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol for an international cricket team is not something that I’d expect to see at any stage and it would be a fault not to look into what happened there. From everything that I’ve heard so far, they actually were pretty well behaved. Very well behaved.”

He added: “We’ve got enough ways of finding out exactly what happened and everything that I’ve heard so far that they sat down, had lunch, had dinner, didn’t go out late, all of that, had the odd drink. I don’t mind that. If it goes past that, then that’s an issue as far as I’m concerned."

Key also said he had previously looked into reports that players had been spotted drinking the night before a match in New Zealand shortly before the Ashes.

A short clip of white-ball captain Harry Brook and Jacob Bethell was shared by a member of the public on social media, said to have been taken while they were out in Wellington before the third one-day international on Nov. 1.

“I didn’t feel like that was worthy of formal warnings, but it was probably worthy of informal ones,” he said.

“I think that was a bit of a wake-up call actually for what they’re going into. I don’t mind players having a glass of wine over dinner. Anything more than that, I think is ridiculous, really.”

AP cricket: https://apnews.com/hub/cricket

Australian players celebrate the dismissal of England's Jamie Smith during play on the final day of the third Ashes cricket test between England and Australia in Adelaide, Australia, Sunday, Dec. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/James Elsby)