Flagrant head coach ranking makes fair but misguided points on Coach Popovich

Gregg Popovich is the unquestioned captain of the San Antonio ship that led the organization to not only their first championship but the four that followed. His players rave about him, and all of the coaches who worked under him praise him as an elite basketball mind and an even better person. That makes fans very defensive of the longest-tenured coach in the league, and they have every reason to be.

Sure, there are Spurs fans who believe he's lost his fastball, but we mainly ignore those people. You have to have players to succeed in this league; no exceptions. Sam Quinn, a CBS sports writer, ranked Coach Pop at 14 in his head coach rankings in the current NBA landscape, and to be fair to Sam, he was very complimentary of Coach Pop. He even admitted to believing Pop is the greatest coach of all time, but in the modern NBA, he finds SA's leader's decision-making questionable lately.

Coach Popovich shouldn't be penalized for a lack of talent

If all it took for a coach to win in the league was for them to have a good player, there would be less turnover in the league, but that's not the case. The head coach matters just as much as the talent. This has been proven countless times across sports when organizations bring in the right person to lead their franchise and the immediate culture improvements that follow.

But the level of the players can't be undervalued just because the coach has immeasurable influence. The two go hand-in-hand. Tim Duncan was everything to the Spurs franchise, and his partnership with Pop is what allowed the team the thrive for the amount of time they did. What seems to be forgotten is that he continued to win games after Duncan retired.

Sam pointed out that Coach Pop hasn't won a playoff series since 2017, while conveniently leaving out what happened that season and what led to it. This was the second season without The Big Fundamental. In the first season, they won 61 games and made the Western Conference Finals, looking poised to take Golden State to the brink before Kawhi Leonard's devastating injury.

In 2017, Leonard played a total of nine games and the season was filled with the drama surrounding that situation. They still won 47 games 100% should have lost in the first round without their star player. 2018 was DeMar's first year and your two best players were midrange merchants in a league where the three-pointer had already become even more prevalent than it already was. The team was not equipped with the right personnel to make a deep run.

That last sentence is the crux of the Spurs' struggles ever since. Coach Pop was criticized in the article for San Antonio's place at the bottom of the league in three-point attempts, but they haven't had players you can depend on from deep to implement that strategy. You have to play to the strengths of your personnel even when those strengths are few.

Coach Pop has much more to work with this season. If the team remains at the bottom of the Western Conference and he's making questionable decisions, we can revisit this conversation. Until then, let's not undervalue a coach who has already shown an uncanny ability to morph his system to get the most out of whoever is wearing silver and black. It's a special trait that not everyone has, and as the rebuild rounds out, he'll get to show everyone his fastball is just as crisp as ever.