Greg Popovic: 1,506 wins and one loss

I don’t know if Greg Popovic has haters or just lovers behind him who would burn for his party… It will have from you too, nobody is perfect, devil.

But with my poor mind I’ll say again, whether you like him or not, one thing doesn’t change: the so-called is a guy!

More specifically, it is Typaras.

I was told this a few hours ago by a basketball fan friend of mine, Giannis Sombolos at Trace N’ Chase and I agree, add and bid. It’s Typaras, I hope George Karagounis, who has borne that nickname for many years, is not misunderstood.

Meraklis and πε bekris

Aside from Typaras, there are a number of other things: ideology to ideology, an avid drinker to a scepter.

I’m joking with the latter, I’m only writing it because twice, when we started a conversation in a relaxed way, we talked about wine.

Two ended up becoming three!

On the night of June 15, 2014, as Spurs beat Heat 105-87 to win their fifth and final title, we set up a ring with Rigas Dardalis outside the dressing room and I asked him how he would celebrate the triumph…

A little further, the Campanian wine flowed freely and as happens in those dithyrambic moments, the field managers cover everything with large nylon covers to prevent damage…

Bathed in champagne, sweet Coach Pop certainly didn’t “bleach” with his smell, but he told me he’d rather go home and open a bottle of good red wine.

One of the prisoners…

The Karkambasis wine cellar and the retsina with Giannakis

Twenty months later, in February 2016, on the sidelines of the All Star Game in Toronto, former Olympiacos player Elias Karkambasis, who has been involved in winemaking for many years and is a well-known sommelier, testified to me that he regularly supplies Popovic with the best Rich wine labels. from…

The two arrested…

Good luck on September 6, 2019, the eve of the match between National and Team USA as part of the World Championships in Shenzhen, China…

I then asked him about his connections and memories from Greece and his answer had an intoxicating smell again…

“Coach Pi (SS: Panagiotis Giannakis) is excellent. We went together for octopus and resin. “He’s a great guy and I had a great time with him.”

And we all have good times with him through the years, so the good times are mutual!

The 1,366 victories, the goat and her accomplices

Popovic is a basketball totem. A legend. An insurmountable legend who yesterday overtook Don Nelson (who, by the way, offered him a job while out of work) and now emerges from the penthouse skyscraper with the most wins in NBA history…

We’re talking about 1,336 wins, we’re not playing!

We’re talking about 1,336 regular-season wins, apart from another 170 in the playoffs, apart from the 2,314 games, apart from the champion’s five rings, apart from the 22 straight post-season appearances, country of 199 players the all varied over the years, has sat on the same bench since 1996!

It goes without saying that Spurs never tired of seeing his face for a quarter of a century and put…

Alongside all of that, Popovic is credited with something else: adapting a 1975 film starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford that deals with the scandal. water gate.

All of the coach’s people

I mean the political thriller “All the President’s Men”: “All the President’s People” and in this case “All the Coach’s People”.

That aside: In fact, during this quarter-century that Spurs has been at the helm, Popovic has rocked, coached, nurtured, nurtured in his own sacred namas, and gifted generations and generations of players and staff-turned-coaches and managers in the NBA and elsewhere.

For all of them he was a teacher, mentor and trainer, but also for people who did not belong to his direct sphere of influence: I mean opponents, referees, journalists, fans and so on…

Culture and horizontal basketball

In addition, he imposed a style and established a basketball culture more akin to international basketball than the as Andrea Trinkieri once told me, horizontal basketball stands in contrast to vertical basketball, which overwhelms the majority of teams on the Atlantic side.

This horizontal and multicultural basketball, coupled with correct reading of the phases, ball movement, keeping the distances and opposing in the sense of the eternal “one on one” made the Spurs game attractive, attractive and certainly victorious when you consider that the so-called masters were crowned five times,

The 1,506 wins and one loss

I was there for some of Popovic’s 1,506 wins, but also for one of his 808 losses, which became the subject of one of the biggest debates in world basketball history.

On the night of June 18, 2013 at the American Airlines Arena in Miami, in the sixth final of the playoffs, the Spurs led 95-92 and the Heat failed in the final attack, but Chris Boss missed a kick and landed in Ray’s hands Allen …

The second bomber in NBA history didn’t pass up the opportunity: in the name of the sometimes sinful, sinking basketball morale, the Spurs didn’t foul him and Allen knocked out the corner-3, ending the game and opening the ball up for the home team to win in overtime.

That night, the Spurs didn’t lose a match but a championship, recorded by Miami in the seventh playoff…

The question that makes sperm

We described this thriller with Dardalis on Cosmote TV and as soon as the closing horn blew I ran to the press room to hear for myself what Greg Popovic would say in the interview…

No American journalist asked him about this phase, and with the risk that my question would go unanswered, and while I was preparing to raise my hand, my friend from Gazzetta Dello Sport, Massimo Oriani, caught up with me and finally asked the question , who makes jazz. .

“You’re probably European and polluting there, right?“Popovic replied…

“Yes, I’m Italian,” Oriani confirmed, and we all hung on Pop’s every word.

“We are not!

“We won’t do it,” he said dryly, got up from his seat and left!

William Shakespeare’s falsified dilemma for the occasion had just been answered with dramatic brevity!

Later, when I met Ettore Messina elsewhere (Popovic’s later collaborator), I asked him about his decision and – to say my sin – no matter how many arguments he put forward, he didn’t convince me, but again theirs) …