High And Mighty

The series also further validated the coaching acumen of Popovich , whose team ( Duncan 's brilliance notwithstanding) was made up of the slightly-too-old ( Robinson , forwards Kevin Willis and Danny Ferry , and guards Steve Kerr and Steve Smith ), slightly-too-callow (Parker and Claxton ), slightly-too-tentative (swingman Bruce Bowen ) and slightly-too-freewheeling ( Jackson and Ginobili). "Pop was the only one who envisioned it all coming together," says the 36-year-old Ferry, who, like Smith, 34, and Willis , 40, earned his first championship ring. "Our young guys would make all these mistakes, and it would drive Pop crazy, yet he stayed with them because he could see what they would eventually accomplish for us. And as great as Tim is—trust me on this—Pop coaches him. That's the best thing about this team: Pop coaches everybody."

The grinding, hard-to-score nature of the series mandated beaucoup button-pushing from both benches. Clearly Popovich had the edge over the Nets' Byron Scott , who will undoubtedly hear that he should have given 7'2" Dikembe Mutombo more minutes, that he should have put long-armed Kerry Kittles on San Antonio 's point guards before Game 4 and that he should have found a better way to attack the Spurs' 3-2 zone.

That last criticism has the most validity. The restriction on zone defenses was lifted before last season, and this was the first NBA championship ever determined, to a large extent, by a zone. Whenever New Jersey would get on a roll, Popovich would leap from his seat and hold both fists in the air, the signal for the Spurs to go into their 3-2. Pop is by nature a man-to-man coach, so any zone he installed was not going to be a passive one. He worked it more like a matchup, exhorting his defenders to always have a hand in a shooter's face. Except for a brief span in Game 5 when Kidd shook loose for a couple of open jumpers, the Nets were at a loss against the zone—as they were against San Antonio 's transition D, which held them to 97 fast-break points in six games. "Don't backpedal back!" Popovich would scream at practices. " Sprint !"

Had the irascible Popovich, 54, not made two fateful decisions years earlier, he might have ended up in another hemisphere or in another line of work. The first decision came in the early 1970s when he was a young Air Force captain stationed along the U.S.S.R. -Turkey border. As a freshman at the Air Force Academy , Popovich had taken a course in Russian, fallen in love with the language and wound up majoring in Soviet studies. By graduation he spoke Russian fluently and was knowledgeable about the history, politics and geography of the Soviet Union . With the cold war still raging, he was a natural to be recruited into military intelligence. Popovich was asked to do something he found distasteful, however, and that helped him decide to get out of the service in 1975 and return to the academy as an assistant coach. Popovich grows edgy when that part of his life is brought up, repeatedly saying "No comment." He won't even divulge whether he can't talk about it or merely won't talk about it.

The second decision came in 1986, when Popovich took a sabbatical from Pomona-Pitzer, a Division III school in Claremont , Calif. , where he was the basketball coach and an associate phys-ed professor, and set out to plumb the minds of three leading coaches: Dean Smith at North Carolina , Larry Brown at Kansas and Hank Egan at Air Force, where Popovich had been an aggressive point guard. Popovich spent the preseason in Chapel Hill , "rummaging around the film room, watching practice, stealing every good idea," he says, then visited Brown and his assistants, who included R.C. Bu-ford, now the Spurs' general manager. Popovich was no stranger to Brown; while coaching the Denver Nuggets in '76, Brown had made Popovich his last cut. "He had the audacity to keep David Thompson ahead of me," Popovich says jokingly.

When his three months with the Jay-hawks were up, Brown persuaded Popovich to skip his trip to see Egan and stay the remainder of the season in Lawrence . "You don't say no to Larry Brown ," says Pop, who formed a lifelong bond with the eternal vagabond, a connection that all but assured that he would have constant employment.

Pop's next move was to San Antonio , where Brown had headed after winning the 1988 NCAA championship. Popovich felt he was prepared for the NBA 's X's and O's—just to be contrary, he sometimes says, "O's and X's"—but dressing the part was another matter. He owned two sport coats, one a drab patch-on-the-elbows number, the other a blue blazer that had been issued to him years earlier at Air Force. He chose the latter for his first NBA game. Right after tip-off Brown, a noted clotheshorse, saw that Popovich had failed to remove the protective foil the dry cleaners had put over the buttons. "The game's going on, and Larry's scrambling to get the foil off," recalls Buford.

After Brown bolted for the Los Angeles Clippers midway through the 1991-92 season, Don Nelson asked Popovich to join his Golden State Warriors staff without even interviewing him. "I had watched him work with players before games and seen the rapport he had with them, and I liked his work ethic," says Nelson . Popovich returned to San Antonio as general manager in '94, and 18 games into the '96-97 season he fired Bob Hill and replaced him with... Gregg Popovich . Hill had won 62 and 59 games in the preceding seasons, but Popovich doubted Hill's ability to practice what Brown had long preached: Championships can be won only with solid defensive schemes.

With his drill-sergeant visage, accented by the military crew cut and his occasional sideline implosions, Popovich gave the team a harder edge, and in 1998-99, two years after Duncan's arrival as the No. 1 pick in the 1997 draft, he drove the Spurs to their first tide. Popovich stepped down as G.M. in 2002, though not before laying the groundwork for a startling feat: San Antonio not only finished with a 60-22 record and the championship this season, but it also enters the summer with more room under the salary cap than any other team in the NBA . "Genius is a big word," says Buford, "but when you're around Pop [and you] see how his mind works, see how he always has a grasp of the big picture, that's the word you use."

Popovich is no Einstein, though, when it comes to cultivating a public image. Peter Holt, the Spurs' chairman and CEO, jokingly calls him Mr. Personality and despairs from time to time that "Pop is his own worst enemy." Journalists who question Popovich's strategy are fortunate to get a sarcastic reply, which is better than his angry one. "Jesus! Do I have to answer that?" he snapped after a reporter asked him early in the Finals why he wasn't giving Kerr more minutes. But those who cover the team regularly appreciate his wit and intelligence, however sardonically he wields them. Informed that his post-Game 6 interview session had concluded, Popovich stayed planted in his chair. "That's all I get to do?" he said. "How many times is this going to happen? Do I look like Phil Jackson ? This is Popovich." He answered questions for another five minutes, until Robinson ambled in and said jokingly, "Are you still here?"