On Sunday night, the San Antonio Spurs will retire the jersey of Tim Duncan — franchise leader in points, games played, minutes played, field goals made, rebounds, and blocks, among other statistical categories. Understandably, head coach Gregg Popovich, who coached Duncan for the entirety of his 19-year career, expects to get a bit emotional during the ceremony. Popovich spoke a bit about his relationship with Duncan with ESPN’s Marc Stein:
As the San Antonio Spurs prepare to retire Tim Duncan’s No. 21 jersey Sunday night, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich has described Duncan ?as “like my son.”
“I love him dearly,” Popovich told ESPN’s SportsCenter in an interview earlier this week.
Told that Spurs president R.C. Buford once described the two as “soulmates” to ESPN.com, Popovich said: “We’re more soulmates in life than we are in basketball. I’ve been on his fanny so many times throughout his 19 years, and half the time he agrees with me and half the time he thinks I’m a nut. And he just is polite enough and mature enough to just ignore me and go back out on the court, which allowed me to coach everybody else all those years. But off the court, that’s where we’re soulmates.”
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“?I think about it more off the court than I do during games or practices,” Popovich told SportsCenter. “You get busy, you get into what you’re doing, but I miss him on the plane and on the bus trips and in the locker room after a win or a loss. Just the banter back and forth that we’ve had for, whatever, 19 or 20 years. I miss all of that.
“We might be somewhere at a certain moment in time and somebody says something [about Duncan] in a melancholy manner or reminiscing about such and such because we were all there at some point. But that’s only happened a couple of times. Everybody has to move on.?”
Duncan, though, has been a relatively frequent guest at Spurs practices this season, working out with former teammates or new Spurs like center Pau Gasol, or counseling younger players such as forward Jonathon Simmons.
“He jumps in and out,” Popovich said. “A little bit of scouting [to] tell us what he thinks about this player or that player. Little bit of one-on-one here and there. Little bit of coaching, what we’re doing in pick-and-roll and what we’re doing here. Just hanging around — just jumping in, putting a toe in the water, wherever he feels like it. It’s great.
“We never know [when Duncan will show up], honestly. It’s totally random. Everything is extemporaneous. He’s there or he’s not. We might walk through the building and all of a sudden he’s in there lifting weights. We put a locker for him in the coach’s locker room in the practice facility and at the AT&T Center so he comes whenever he feels like it.”
This whole emotional and vulnerable persona is one that we haven’t before seen from Popovich, who is known to be rather standoffish and cold with his stone-faced sarcasm. The fact that Popovich is so willing to open up to the media is a testament to the strength of his relationship with “soulmate” Tim Duncan.
