The 20 different emotions of Gregg Popovich

1. Scientific

Like an anthropomorphic vole carefully tucking his sweatervest into his shoes to improve aerodynamics while traveling through time.

The vole’s name is CJ, and he is my friend.

Basketball is as much science as it is art. It’s also as much sport as it is either of those things. There’s also a bit of macho histrionics and posturing thrown in. It’s basically a fajita buffet of all those elements. Wrap them all in a tortilla, and that’s the best analogy for basketball there is.

Pop, at times, is the most grilled-veggies of coaches. You can picture him in his Texas lab, extracting the essence of various basketballs into test tubes and injecting the contents directly into his casks of red wine. He lets the basketball ferment into the perfect vintage of basketball juice then submits it to whatever the FDA equivalent of the playoffs is.

Yes, that is how these things work. Popovich is a studious man. He’s learned a lot, and teaches a lot. He fosters an environment of quiet reflection with screaming. People in the past have not compared the Spurs locker room to a library, but if they had I would have been sure to mention it here.

When one looks at this picture, it’s hard not to try and picture what discovery he’ll have next. The Beautiful Game Spurs took D’Antoni’s seven-seconds-or-less concept and translated it to the modern game. Pop apparently hated it, but that’s the thing about science. It doesn’t care what you think. You can either choose to embrace the data and apply it, or you can look a fool.

Look at this picture. Pop’s mom raised no fool.

Anyway, here is Pop…