Photo by Ronald Cortes/Getty Images.

Since Gregg Popovich took over as head coach of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs in 1996, the rest of the league’s teams have replaced their leaders more than 228 times. No other coach has held his current job for more than a decade. Popovich is a tenured professor in a league stocked with adjuncts. He’s earned this security by compiling an unprecedented track record: Since the 1997-98 season, his first full one as coach, the Spurs have finished with a winning record 22 consecutive times, the only team in history to achieve this, and have won five championships.



Popovich’s astonishing performance has occurred even though the NBA runs something of a welfare state, funneling young talent to bad teams through its amateur draft and restraining good teams with a salary cap that makes it difficult to hoard stars. The non-Spurs franchises that have won the NBA title since he started have all also endured hopeless losing seasons during that time. The league wants it this way: Having 30 franchises on crisscrossing roller coasters keeps fans in every market engaged.

To defy this system requires extraordinary managerial skill, and Popovich’s tenure is an ongoing clinic in teamwork. Night after night, year after year, his players perform with poise and precision. Most games they make fewer mistakes than their opponents and, despite powerful incentives to the contrary, work together selflessly. “The San Antonio culture is something that many teams in basketball, and I’m sure other sports, seek to emulate,” says Jerry Colangelo, former owner of the Phoenix Suns and managing director of USA Basketball, who in 2016 appointed Popovich head coach of the U.S. Men’s Olympic team.

At this point, business-magazine convention demands I tell you that coaches aren’t the only ones who can learn from Popovich—that he offers an example for leaders of sales teams, architects, line cooks, programmers, roughnecks, and others who want to perform better. Basketball-coach-as-management-guru has been the template for many dumb books and seminars. I’ve read Pat Riley’s The Winner Within: A Life Plan for Team Players, in which the legendary coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks, and Miami Heat sandwiches insights such as “Dynasties demand determination” between quotes from Winston Churchill and Sun Tzu. Even John Wooden’s vaunted system, the Pyramid of Success, is, peace be upon him, little more than a list of positive attributes that a 10-year-old could have compiled.

These attempts at advice serve mostly to expose the limits of what can be extrapolated from the experiences of people who manage small, coddled groups of elite talents in a highly specialized job. Few warehouse supervisors face problems akin to managing the minutes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the twilight of his career.

Popovich sees these limits as well. He doesn’t have an advice book or go on the speaking circuit, though he could easily make millions from either. He has, with rare exception, refused to grant interviews about himself or his methods, including to Bloomberg Businessweek for this story. He professes to be skeptical that he has anything to teach people outside the world of basketball. “Oh, hell, I don’t know anything about innovation,” he told Jack McCallum of Sports Illustrated in 2013.

Don’t let this modesty fool you. Popovich would be the rare coach whose managerial-advice book might actually warrant reading. Although his success begins with passion and a particular skill set, his methods are also distinguished by some broadly applicable social prowess. His main innovation, so to speak, has been to bring empathy and worldliness to a profession that has long valorized toughness and single-mindedness.

So, yes, anybody can learn from Popovich. But don’t take my word for it. Ask President Trump. In October 2016, less than a month before he was elected, Trump held a fundraiser at a hotel in San Antonio. According to the San Antonio Express-News, he told the assembled donors that the Spurs were a model of smart management. “Wouldn’t it be great if the country were run like that?” he asked.

It would be, Mr. President. For that, though, we need a credo—the one Popovich won’t write himself. In keeping with genre convention, I’ve organized it according to a clumsy architectural metaphor: the Five Pillars of Popovich.

(From left) Sean Elliott, Popovich, David Robinson, and Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs pose with the Larry O’Brien Trophy after defeating the New York Knicks in Game 5 to win the 1999 NBA championship. Photo by Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images.

Pillar 1: Own Your Luck

In November 2017, a few hours before an early-season home game against the Los Angeles Clippers, Manu Ginobili comes to the sideline after a morning shoot-around at the Spurs’ practice facility. Ginobili, an Argentine-born guard, has spent his entire NBA career under Popovich, after being selected by the Spurs late in the 1999 draft. He was 21 and playing in Italy, unknown in the U.S. but wowing fans abroad with the inventive style that would make him a legend. I ask Ginobili why the Spurs haven’t had a bad season in two decades—what they’re doing that nobody else does. The story begins, he reminds me, with a twist of fate.

Late in December 1996, just after Popovich took over, David Robinson broke his left foot. The future Hall of Fame center was done for the season. The Spurs finished 20-62, out of the playoffs and in the draft lottery—a pingpong-ball draw among the NBA’s worst teams. They won the first pick and took Tim Duncan, a forward from the U.S. Virgin Islands. For the next 19 years, Duncan dominated games with sublime efficiency. “When you are coming from a star like David Robinson, and he gets hurt, and the next year you get Tim Duncan, you got lucky,” Ginobili says. “You’ve just got to admit it.”

Popovich does. “I would not be standing here if it was not for Tim Duncan,” he told reporters after Duncan retired in 2016. “I’d be in the Bud league, the Budweiser league, someplace in America, fat and still trying to play basketball or coach basketball.” He was exaggerating, but perhaps not by much. Popovich was the Spurs’ general manager at the outset of the 1996-97 campaign—he still oversees basketball operations—and had installed himself as coach after the team won only 3 of its first 18 contests. At his first home game, the fans booed him. Will Perdue, then a center on the team, says he had no inkling of what Popovich would become. “He would always say, ‘Listen, man, I’m not a genius. I don’t really know that much about basketball, but I am going to learn like you.’ ” Duncan’s arrival gave Popovich a chance to establish himself, a luxury not every coach gets.

It’s easy to be defensive about luck, to see it as undercutting a history of hard work. Popovich doesn’t indulge in this particular vanity. This sets an example for the team, to acknowledge good fortune and share acclaim. “I walk around the city now, and people try to give me way too much credit for transforming this franchise,” says Robinson, whose arrival in 1989 precipitated a 35-win improvement the following season. He begins to list others who played a part, from Duncan to current Spurs General Manager R.C. Buford. “Everybody has had such a huge role in this team turning around. And Pop understands that.”

Pillar 2: Do Your Work

Popovich, now 68, with a long, dour face and a statesman’s white beard, has been a basketball junkie since his childhood in northern Indiana, on the southern outskirts of Chicago. After getting cut from his high school basketball team as a sophomore, according to the Express-News, he honed his skills by seeking out competition on the playgrounds in nearby Gary. He made the team the following year, then earned a roster spot at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he enrolled in 1966. During summers back in Indiana, he would borrow a key to the high school gym and spend hours alone practicing defensive slide steps. At Air Force, he was a tenacious if not especially gifted player—good enough to get a tryout invitation for the 1972 U.S. Olympic team, but not good enough to make the cut. After stints as an intelligence officer in Turkey and Northern California, Popovich returned to the academy as an assistant coach in 1973. His first head coaching job came at Pomona-Pitzer in 1979.

Pomona and Pitzer are two small Southern California colleges that share a Division III basketball team. When Popovich arrived, the Sagehens were doormats. In his first season, they finished 2-22. As he had in high school, Popovich resorted to brute effort. He built lists of high school coaches and made hundreds of calls in hopes of identifying kids who were bright enough to get into Pomona or Pitzer and talented enough to help the team win—but not so talented that they’d go elsewhere. “He took the time that most coaches wouldn’t do because it was exhausting,” says Steven Koblik, then a history professor at Pomona who served as an academic adviser to the team. “He was on the phone every night.”

Over eight seasons, Popovich built the Sagehens into a respectable team. In 1986 he took a sabbatical to work as a coaching intern at the prestigious University of Kansas program under Larry Brown, who had cut him from the 1972 Olympic squad. Two years later he became an assistant coach of the Spurs under Brown. Popovich spent four seasons in the job and another two as an assistant with the Golden State Warriors before returning to the Spurs as general manager in 1994.

He maintained his work ethic throughout. “I don’t think you can understand his success without remembering that,” says Koblik, who remains a close friend. “This is a working-class kid who long ago discovered that what he didn’t have in natural talent he could make up just by outworking people.” The long hours are a prerequisite to everything Popovich does, establishing his credibility and earning goodwill. “No one questions how much film he watches. No one questions his game plan,” Robinson says. “He does his work.”

Pillar 3: Unleash Your Anger (Strategically)

In January 2005, Koblik made one of his occasional visits to San Antonio, where he stays with Popovich and his wife. One Saturday while he was there, the Spurs won at home against the Denver Nuggets. Popovich didn’t like the way his team had played, though, and had to be talked out of laying into them after the game. Still angry that night, he told Koblik that when the Spurs went to Salt Lake City for their next game, he would, as a lesson to the players, withhold his normal energy and feedback from the bench. In Utah, the Spurs lost on a last-second shot, their first loss to the Jazz in almost five years. Afterward, Popovich flew into a rage.

“He’s yelling at his coaches the entire flight,” Koblik says. “And in between he is walking up and down the aisles among the players, yelling at them.” When they landed, Popovich kept going while Koblik waited on the tarmac next to Popovich’s car. “He finally comes out of the plane with his briefcase, and he comes over, and he realizes that he doesn’t have his car keys. So now it’s two o’clock in the morning. He throws the briefcase on the tarmac, and it splits open.”

After retrieving his keys from the plane, Popovich picked up where he’d left off, reciting his team’s failures until Koblik finally had enough: “I said, ‘Gregg, why don’t you shut up? You wanted to lose the game because you wanted to beat the s--- out of your players and your coaches. You’ve now done that. And I frankly don’t want to listen to you rant and rave all the way over to your house.’ ”

With that, Popovich stopped. “He looked at me and said, ‘OK,’ and that was it.” Koblik tells the story to illustrate a point: Popovich’s flashes of anger are genuine—and genuinely unpleasant—but also under his control. “If he gets thrown out of a game, he did this because he thought it would help his team,” Koblik says. “He never allows his upset to stop his thinking.”

Popovich’s fits have become a beloved NBA ritual. I’m a fan myself. In November 2017, during a game against the Warriors, I got to see one in person. In the fourth quarter, with the Spurs trailing by 12, Popovich erupted at the officials for failing to call a travel. He ran onto the floor, pointing and yelling and chasing a referee, who called a technical foul on him. During the ensuing free throw, Popovich kept at it, drawing a second technical and getting ejected from the game. The crowd roared in approval. Watching the scene unfold, I thought of Koblik’s story. Popovich, in all likelihood, had decided to get himself thrown out of an impending loss—perhaps to signal solidarity to his team or so the night’s officials would remember next time around.

Barry Staw, a professor of organizational psychology at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, has studied the impact of what he calls “unpleasant emotional expressions” in the locker room. Years ago he and two other researchers arranged to record the halftime talks of 23 Bay Area basketball coaches. After collecting more than 300 speeches, they had independent listeners rate them for the intensity of unpleasant emotion. (Staw says his wife barred him from listening to the tapes in their kitchen because some were so “nasty and blistering.”)

The study, whose publication is pending, found that anger correlated with improved second-half performance—to a point. When the intensity reached what Staw calls “Bobby Knight level,” in reference to the famously intemperate former Indiana University and Texas Tech coach, it began to have a negative effect. The study also found that unpleasantness didn’t work as well for the coaches who displayed it most often. When followers come to expect anger from a leader, Staw and his co-authors suggest, it becomes noise. Perdue, the former Spurs center, recalls seeing Popovich flip over a table of drinks in the middle of the locker room early in his career. He says the outbursts were memorable: “I thought he did a really good job of picking his spots. It wasn’t like ‘There goes Pop again.’ ”

The players haven’t tired of his act in part because of the conditions he creates around his anger. First, Popovich is clear about his expectations. “When you step out on the court, not only you but every other player on the floor knows what he is asking of you,” says Robinson, who retired in 2003. “We have these basic rules, like ‘Don’t ever let guys drive middle.’ That’s a simple rule. If a guy drives middle, you made a mistake.” So when Popovich gets angry, there’s rarely confusion about why. “It’s all triggered off the way we play,” says Patty Mills, an Australian point guard who’s now in his seventh season with the Spurs.

Popovich also distributes his rancor fairly. When Duncan made mistakes, Popovich would get in his face, too. Duncan accepting his share made it hard for others to complain. “When your superstar could take a little bit now and then, everybody else could shut the hell up and fall in line,” Popovich said after Duncan retired.

“He can be an asshole on the court,” Ginobili says. “But when the game is over, you know he is just doing his job.”

Pillar 4: Widen Your World

At the morning shootaround before the Clippers game in November, Popovich opens with a question: Who fought against the British in the First Boer War? (Answer: the South African Republic.) Every Spurs practice begins with a lesson like this. “Today’s was a very short one, but there are﻿ other ones that we’ll dig a little bit deeper,” Mills says afterward.

As gym rats go, Popovich is unusually well-cultivated. He’s a renowned wine connoisseur who majored in Soviet studies at the Air Force Academy and remains a voracious reader. (Koblik makes it his job to bring Popovich books. Recent picks include Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith.) He brings all his interests into the locker room. Before the 2016–17 season, Popovich gave his players copies of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Current and former Spurs say these gestures help them maintain perspective. “He knows that basketball is great and all, but life is bigger than that,” says Danny Green, a guard in his eighth season with the team. The books and history lessons also provide players with common ground for more substantial relationships. “It does bring us together,” Mills says of the pop quizzes. “We’ll be at a team dinner with just the guys, and then that topic will come up, and we’ll start talking about it.”

Pillar 5: Know Your People

Seven years ago, at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, I saw Jeff Van Gundy, an ESPN analyst and former coach of the New York Knicks and Houston Rockets, speak on a panel about what makes a great athlete. Van Gundy said that when he was a coach, he looked for players who, if you put a copy of USA Today in front of them, would pick up the sports page and ignore the rest. He wanted his players to be interested in two things: “Chasing women and basketball.” His words startled me. They seemed to degrade NBA players (not to mention women) and make their lives sound dreary. But Van Gundy was just expressing, in especially blunt fashion, what was once locker-room orthodoxy. The message from many coaches, Robinson says, was “Be an animal. Focus on the game.”

Popovich has flipped that idea on its head. He wants his players to be fully human. And he’s genuinely curious about them. “I was kind of amazed by how much he wanted to know about you as an individual,” Perdue says. Other coaches, he says, stopped short of where Popovich was willing to go. “They cared about you, but they didn’t really want to overextend themselves in case you got cut or got traded. … I don’t think Pop ever even considered that. He saw you as a human being first and a basketball player second.” As Popovich’s former players and assistants—including Steve Kerr at Golden State, Mike Budenholzer of the Atlanta Hawks, and Brett Brown of the Philadelphia 76ers—have taken head coaching jobs around the league, his approach has become the new orthodoxy.

There is, as Perdue points out, a risk in doing things this way. A coach may discover that he doesn’t particularly like a player or that he likes him too much to treat him impartially. And caring is hard. It can’t be faked. But even now, says Perdue, who works as a studio analyst for NBC Sports Chicago, his old coach expects depth when the two run into each other. “When you shake hands, he will grab hold and be like, ‘All right, no bulls---, how are you doing?’… He won’t let go of your hand until he gets answers that he feels are genuine and honest.” Popovich, by all accounts, handles the most difficult interactions—roster cuts, trades, and demotions to the bench—with the same candor.

Perdue remembers sitting in the locker room after a playoff game in which he’d tried, and mostly failed, to guard the Jazz’s bruising Hall of Fame forward Karl Malone. “I got ice on my knees. I got my ankles in ice buckets. I got ice on my elbows,” he says. Popovich came over, put his arm around Perdue, and said that he expected more from him. Perdue was stunned. He stewed throughout the bus ride back to the hotel. But when he arrived, he found Popovich waiting for him. “I’ve said my piece,” he remembers the coach saying. “Let’s go break bread, have some wine, and let’s talk about everything but basketball.” When the Spurs travel, Popovich hosts team dinners after games, often arranging for restaurants to stay open late.

Kerr, the Warriors’ coach, played under Popovich for four seasons. Before the game between the two teams in November, he spent a few minutes talking about his old boss. Popovich, he said, had a policy of allowing families on the team plane. For Kerr, who had young kids, it was “the coolest thing ever. Nobody had ever done that before in the NBA, at least on any of the teams I played for.”

These extra efforts don’t just warm players’ hearts; they help solve the essential problem of any collective endeavor: getting people to subordinate self-interest to a common goal. The issue is especially acute in an NBA locker room, where most everyone has been the best player on every team he’s ever played for and is under pressure to make as much money as possible in a short time. With the Spurs, Robinson says, selfishness is acknowledged and incorporated in the collective. “You feel like all these guys want you to make as much money as you can.”

Empathy is the elixir that makes this happen. “Yes, we’re disciplined with what we do,” Popovich told Sports Illustrated in 2013. “But that’s not enough. Relationships with people are what it’s all about. You have to make players realize you care about them. And they have to care about each other and be interested in each other. Then they start to feel a responsibility toward each other. Then they want to do for each other.”

The Spurs haven’t won a title since 2014. Yet Popovich’s stature has only grown since his last championship. The 2016-2017 season, the first after Duncan retired, the Spurs won 61 games and made it to the semifinals. This season they began with Kawhi Leonard, the team’s best player, sidelined by a thigh injury. The Spurs went 19-8 without him and now sit at 28-14, good enough for third place in the conference. Popovich has shown he can win with whatever lineup is at hand.

At the same time, he’s become known to a new audience for his vocal opposition to President Trump, whose stated admiration Popovich doesn’t return. Days after the election in 2016, Popovich told reporters he was disgusted and scared by the result. “I’m a rich white guy. And I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it,” he said. “I can’t imagine being a Muslim right now, or a woman, or an African American, a Hispanic, a handicapped person.” Later, when Trump claimed that past presidents hadn’t called the families of fallen servicemen and -women to offer condolences, Popovich called him a “soulless coward.”

Popovich has entered the discourse reluctantly, out of a sense of duty, says his friend Koblik. He would be happy to stick to sports in his public comments, but the world around him won’t allow it. During my time in San Antonio, a gunman entered a Baptist church in nearby Sutherland Springs and killed 26 people, including children. After the Spurs’ game that night, Popovich appeared subdued and angry in a brief session with reporters. “We won a basketball game, but considering what’s gone on today, it’s pretty meaningless,” he said. “When you think about the tragedy that those families are suffering, it’s just inconceivable, impossible to put your head around. So I think talking about basketball tonight is probably pretty inappropriate.”

As Popovich’s influence has grown, Trump’s question to his supporters last year—wouldn’t it be great if the country were run as well as the Spurs?—has taken on new seriousness. “I truly would vote for Pop. He would make a great president,” Kerr told reporters in November. Popovich, however, isn’t interested. “I’ve tried to get him to run for political office. That’s been a useless effort,” says Koblik, who says his friend will never give up coaching. “His fantasy life is to coach in some exotic European place where he can get ahold of good wines and enjoy himself.” —With David Ingold