With a 117-110 win against the Los Angeles Lakers on Monday night, San Antonio Spurs head coach Greg Popovich tied Don Nelson for the most career regular season wins by a coach in NBA history.
Popovich could break his tie with 1,335 wins against the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday. Nelson previously told reporters, "I can't wait" to break Popovich's record. "I want her to have him."
Popovich, 73, spent six seasons as an assistant from 1988–94, the first four under Larry Brown at San Antonio (eighth on the list of all-time wins) and two more under Nelson at the Golden State Warriors. He returned to Spurs in 1994 as their general manager. As injuries and losses began at the start of the 1996–97 season, Popovich fired coach Bob Hill, named himself a replacement and took Tank to the No. 1 overall draft pick.
Popovich drafted Tim Duncan with the first pick in 1997, and the rest is history. The pair never missed the playoffs in their 19 seasons together. During that stretch, he won at least 50 games in all except lockout-shortened in the 1998–99 season, when he won his first five championships (1999, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2014).
His success spanned Michael Jordan's Last Dance and the top of LeBron James' career. In the first full season at the helm of Popovich, Duncan's rookie year, the 1998 Western Conference semifinals saw the 56-win Spurs lose to Karl Malone's Utah Jazz. A generation later, Duncan retired from the Spurs squadron that won a franchise-record 67 games in 2016 and lost in the second round to Kevin Durant's Oklahoma City Thunder.
When Duncan entered the Hall of Fame last year, Popovich told reporters, "No Duncan, no championship."
In the first year of the post-Duncan era, Popovich guided a team now led by Kawhi Leonard and LaMarcus Aldridge – and still featuring future Hall of Fame mainstays Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili – to 61 victories and In the finals of the 2017 conference. Zaza Pachulia stepped down Leonard's ankle as the Spurs led 76-55 in Game 1 against the mighty Golden State Warriors, and the rest is another piece of NBA history.
The Warriors returned to win Game 1 and sweep the series in Leonard's absence. Relations between Leonard and Spurs soured during an extended absence that began with an ankle sprain and ended with quadriceps tendinopathy. Once deemed the next pillar of Popovich's remarkable playoff streak, Leonard requested a trade in June 2018. He was sent to Toronto, where he led the Raptors to the 2019 title.
Aldridge, DeMar DeRozan and the Spurs reached the first round of the playoffs that same year under Popovich, losing to the Denver Nuggets in seven games. San Antonio has not made the playoffs since. 22 consecutive winning seasons and a string of playoff appearances - both league records - were snapped inside the Orlando bubble, where the Spurs missed a play-in bid by one game to another short season.
Popovich has many more coaching records. He surpassed Utah Jazz legend Jerry Sloan's record of 1,127 wins with the singles franchise in February 2017. He surpassed Lenny Wilkens' record of 1,412 combined regular season playoff wins in Game 1 of San Antonio's 2019 first-round series with Denver. Popovich's 170 career playoff victories marks the third time after Pat Riley (171) and Phil Jackson (229), the only other coach to win five titles since the BAA merger in 1949 with Red Auerbach.
Publicly known for his deflection, Popovich told reporters on passing the Sloan four years ago, "When you get all those victories, it's a longevity thing more than anything. So I'm on for a while." Thank you for getting the job."
Popovich coached the US men's national team to a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics.
He has developed four infallible Hall of Famers: Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Leonard. Aldridge and David Robinson are the only others to make an All-Star appearance under Popovich. Koch will join his disciples in Springfield when he allows the Hall of Fame to consider his candidacy. Since becoming eligible in 2020, Popovich has reportedly told the institution that he does not want to join until he retires.
He has already passed the Olympic torch to Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who won two titles in four seasons playing for Popovich. When Pop will make it out of his record-breaking NBA coaching career, reports cover the spectrum of sources who speculate that he will retire at the end of the season or return for another season.
Anyway, his record will be safe for some time. Doc Rivers, 60, who was signed by Popovich as a player in 1994, is the only other active coach to hit 1,000 career regular-season victories - a mark he hit in November.