Gregg Popovich’s NBA Coaching Wins Record Is Not His. It’s All of Ours.

Most of us who’ve been following the NBA for two decades or more have read, watched or consumed hours of stories, videos, or interviews about Gregg Popovich. The 73 year-old head coach of the San Antonio Spurs has now been the main voice on the sideline and the guiding force within the locker room…and his Spurs teams (which he would argue were never “his”) have won most of their games. He now sits atop the mythical record books, having accumulated more wins than any other coach in NBA history.

Pop says, “This is not mine. It’s ours.” Even though there have been thousands of Popovich-focused articles, I’ll write one more brief one.

Popovich is the son of a Serbian father and a Croatian mother and he grew up in Indiana. His parents grew up in the 1920s and 1930s…in an especially complicated area of Southern Europe, the Balkans. They came to Indiana, a state that eats, drinks and sleeps basketball.

He majored in Soviet Studies and played college basketball at the Air Force Academy. He considered a career in the CIA (think Homeland!) but ended up as an assistant coach at Air Force. While working as an assistant, he got his Master’s in P.E. and Sport Science. In 1979, he landed his…