Atlanta made the playoffs every year but his last (in 2018). He quickly turned them into a unit of efficiency maximizing automatons, racking up regular season wins and regularly finishing amongst the top five in defense and offense. Budenholzer inherited a team with a few strong players, but no stars, and an assemblage of flawed role players. Truly inspirational stuff.įirst there was his rise to glory in Atlanta. Consider Budenholzer’s 95 Theses For Giannis, his Avatar: “I have visions of big shots at the end of games,” he says, “where he’s driven against a mismatch and gotten to the basket and forced help and made the right read and hit someone for a wide open three.” Like Jim Morrison on ayahuasca in the Mojave Desert. With his Germanic pink hue and Math-lete demeanor, Budenholzer looks like an alcoholic who has never had a drink. His demeanor is generally calm and emotionless, which fits what you’d expect from a stereotypical analytics coach. His name is Mike Budenholzer.īudenholzer is from Holbrook, Arizona, three hours outside of Phoenix, where it sounds like there’s little to do but design perfect plays out of timeouts and attempt to find the true value of Pi. He assisted on the Spurs bench from 1996 through 2013, collecting four rings and left just shy of a fifth. On his deep bench of assistant coaches that have gone onto make the league in their image, was a kid who had worked his way up from video assistant. But Popovich made the Belichickian move to coach to the players he had, to the times he found himself in, and he pulled off a wild revolution of culture that somehow was also the perfect embodiment of that original culture.īut Popovich didn’t act alone. Pat Riley still runs the Heat like a fat camp. Phil Jackson, for instance, is an example of a brilliant basketball mind who couldn’t escape spreading the gospel of the triangle, regardless of its relevance to the modern NBA or the roster fit. In our lives as well as our jobs, change comes hard, increasingly so as we age.
What impressed me about Popovich’s facelift in San Antonio was it showed flexibility. The Spurs always made the right pass, always hit the open shot, and made a middling espresso sipping weirdo like Boris Diaw appear like the second coming of Pete Maravich. Buford, by 2014 the Spurs had nearly won back to back NBA championships, playing a completely new and beautiful brand of ball-movement focused basketball. The future favored 7 Seconds or Less.Īnd so Popovich completely remade how San Antonio played, and armed with an incredible team building job he performed along with his General Manager (and team president and CEO and whatever other title he holds these days), R.J. And rule changes were coming to allow freedom of movement and promote offense and scoring. With the MVP Steve Nash driving a supercharged offense, The Suns had been a dumb Stern suspension shy of knocking off San Antonio and perhaps upending the league a decade early. Mike D’Antoni’s Suns revolutionized NBA offense and shot selection, what constitutes a good shot and how many of them to take.
They had Bruce Bowen, one of the dirtiest assholes that has ever gently nudged his leg under a jump shot in an attempt to sprain an ankle back to the basket bigs like David Robinson and Tim Duncan, and a philosophy that aimed to slow down the ball and grind their opponent to pulp.īut Popovich saw the times were changing. Until that point, the San Antonio Spurs had found a niche as the league’s boring, old school villains. The greatest coaching job that I’ve ever seen was done by Greg Popovich in the late aughts. Where else on the world wide web are you going to find an homage to Mike Budenholzer and a deep dive into Curren$y’s career arc on the same front page? Please support Passion of the Weiss by subscribing to our Patreon.Ībe Beame once saw Greg Popovich give a sommelier a history lesson on 1970s Eastern European rock and its influence in subverting Soviet principles.
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