Popovich, who was of Serb and Croatian descent, played basketball while attending the U.S. Air Force Academy, becoming the team’s captain and leading scorer as a senior during the 1969–70 season. He earned a degree in Soviet studies and later received a master’s degree in physical education and sports sciences from the University of Denver. During his five-year military service in the air force, he toured eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and became the captain of the Armed Forces team that won the 1972 Amateur Athletic Union basketball championship. He also was invited to the training camp for the 1972 U.S. Olympic team, though he failed to make the final squad.
After a stint as an assistant coach at the Air Force Academy, he worked for eight years (1979–86 and 1987–88) as an assistant professor and coach at Pomona-Pitzer Colleges in Claremont, California, serving during the intervening season (1986–87) as a volunteer assistant to head coach Larry Brown at the University of Kansas; he rejoined Brown as an assistant with the Spurs in 1988–89. Popovich moved in 1992 to the staff of the NBA Golden State Warriors before returning to San Antonio in 1994–95 as executive vice president of basketball operations/general manager. He took over as the Spurs head coach after the first 18 games of the 1996–97 season.
Popovich was able to bring out the best in a team that featured “Twin Towers” David Robinson and Tim Duncan, two of the game’s dominant post players, who led San Antonio to NBA championships in 1998–99 and again in 2002–03, when Popovich was named NBA Coach of the Year. Although Robinson retired, Duncan remained, becoming the common denominator for these Spurs championship teams and those that followed later in the decade. According to Hank Egan, the former Air Force head coach who later became an assistant with the Spurs, Popovich’s best quality was “that he knows how to manage people, how to push the right buttons, and who he can push, on and off the court.” Those abilities allowed Popovich to maximize the efforts of a pair of international players, French point guard Tony Parker and Argentine shooting guard Manu Ginobili, who, along with Duncan, were the linchpins for the Spurs as they beat the Detroit Pistons 4–3 to win the NBA championship in 2005 and swept the Cleveland Cavaliers 4–0 in the best-of-seven series championship in 2007.
Popovich guided the Spurs to a conference finals loss to the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2007–08 season, but postseason success eluded the team in the following seasons, which included a first-round loss in 2010–11 to the Memphis Grizzlies as the top-seeded team in the Western Conference. In 2011–12 Popovich led an aging Spurs roster to the best record in the NBA and earned his second Coach of the Year award. The Spurs were upset by the Oklahoma City Thunder in the conference finals that year but advanced to the NBA finals in 2012–13, where the Spurs lost an exciting seven-game series to the Miami Heat. Popovich again guided the Spurs to the NBA’s best record in 2013–14, which led to him being named Coach of the Year a third time.
