With a 117-110 win against the Los Angeles Lakers on Monday night, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich tied Don Nelson for the most career regular season victories by a coach in NBA history.
Popovich can break their tie at 1,335 victories with a win against the Toronto Raptors on Wednsday. Nelson has previously told reporters, “I can’t wait” for Popovich to break the record. “I want him to have it.”
Popovich, 73, spent six seasons as an assistant from 1988-94, the first four under Larry Brown (eighth on the all-time wins list) in San Antonio and two more under Nelson on the Golden State Warriors. He returned to the Spurs as their general manager in 1994. As injuries and losses mounted to start the 1996-97 season, Popovich fired coach Bob Hill, named himself the replacement and steered the tank to a No. 1 overall 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, they won at least 50 games in all but the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season, when they won their first of five championships (1999, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2014).
Their success spanned Michael Jordan’s Last Dance and the apex of LeBron James’ career. In Popovich’s first full season at the helm, Duncan’s rookie year, the 56-win Spurs lost to Karl Malone’s Utah Jazz in the 1998 Western Conference semifinals. A generation later, Duncan retired from a Spurs squadron that won a franchise-record 67 games in 2016 and lost to Kevin Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder in the second round.
When Duncan entered the Hall of Fame last year, Popovich told reporters, “No Duncan, no championships.”
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 wins and the 2017 conference finals. With the Spurs leading 76-55 in Game 1 against the mighty Golden State Warriors, Zaza Pachulia stepped under Leonard’s ankle, and the rest is yet another slice of of NBA history.
The Warriors stormed back to win Game 1 and sweep the series in Leonard’s absence. The relationship between Leonard and the Spurs soured during an extended absence that began with the 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 under Popovich that same year, losing to the Denver Nuggets in seven games. San Antonio has not made the playoffs since. A string of 22 consecutive winning seasons and playoff appearances — both league records — was finally snapped inside the Orlando bubble, where the Spurs missed a play-in bid by one game in another shortened season.
Popovich owns several more coaching records. He surpassed Utah Jazz legend Jerry Sloan’s previous record of 1,127 wins with a single franchise in February 2017. He eclipsed Lenny Wilkens’ previous record of 1,412 combined regular season playoff victories in Game 1 of San Antonio’s 2019 first-round series with Denver. Popovich’s 170 career playoff wins are third all-time behind Pat Riley (171) and Phil Jackson (229), who along with Red Auerbach are the only other coaches to win five titles since the BAA merger in 1949.
Famous for publicly deflecting, Popovich told reporters upon passing Sloan four years ago, “When you get all those wins, it’s just a longevity thing more than anything. So I’m thankful for having the job for a while.”
Popovich also coached the U.S. men’s national team to a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics.
He has developed four surefire Hall of Famers: Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Leonard. Aldridge and David Robinson are the only others to make All-Star appearances under Popovich. The coach will join his protégés in Springfield when he lets the Hall of Fame consider his candidacy. Since becoming eligible in 2020, Popovich has reportedly told the institution that he does not want to be inducted 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. As for when Pop will call it quits on his record-breaking NBA coaching career, reports cover the spectrum of sources who speculate he will retire at season’s end or return for another season.
Either way, his record will be safe for some time. Doc Rivers, 60, who Popovich signed as a player in 1994, is the only other active coach with 1,000 career regular-season victories — a mark he only hit in November.
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Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach