The Josh Innes Show - Pop Retires

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Gregg Popovich has retired from coaching the Spurs. Say what you will about the dude politically, but, winning 5 titles in San Antonio is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in sports history. You could argue that 5 titles in San Antonio is in fact the most remarkable accomplishment in sports history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, so I guess I'll finally crack open the Celsius now Been sitting there long enough. Maybe this will get me all jazzed up for the next wave of podcast today, huh It really just does taste tastes like a cherry Coke zero But with tons of energy in it, I guess so rock on My sister says that she drinks a Celsius like one a day. I don't know how you can just drink one of these things. Like how our grandma used to drink like one cup of tea over the the, you know, the course of like 10 hours.

I want to say a cup of tea. Our grandmother was not British or anything. She didn't have a tea and crumpets and little cubes of sugar and honey. She just drank one little plastic little mug of tea that she'd make individually in each cup every day. I never saw her do two a day, but anyway, Celsius Sparkling Cherry Cola. So I guess we'll see what this does. Maybe my sister drinks a bigger Celsius than this, but this is small. I don't know how you can just nurse one of these all day. I don't know.

This isn't bad. Kind of tastes like Sammy Hagar, who by the way, has very delicious canned cocktails, and one of them is a like a cherry cola rum cocktail. Yes, rum with his beach bar rum. Fantastic shit, and I would advise you all to sample it if at all possible. Although it's tough to find. Actually you know what, if you're in Houston, I did find those at Specs in Midtown. Because Sammy's actually been to the Specs in Midtown. By the way, big Sammy Hagar guy here as you know, you should try the Santo Tequila, the one that's the mashup with him and Guy Fieri. I would advise all of you to try the Santo Tequila if you haven't already.

It's fantastic. Sammy's Beach Bar Rum is solid to mix with shit and his canned cocktails are also really good. Now I want to go find some, although they're hard to find. I had to drive deep into the slums of East St. Louis, Illinois to find it last time, so might have to do that again, but this is lovely. Anyway, Celsius Sparkling Cherry Cola. Pretty solid. We'll see if this changes me at all throughout the duration of this here podcast. All right, let's play a couple commercials here and then we'll talk about Greg Popovich retiring and we

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Ah! Woo! Okay. All right. What a course life is cold enough, the mountains on the can turn blue! So the next time you want a cold lager, cold filter, cold package, core's light, just wait until those glorious mountains on the can turn blue! It's easy to say that fast when you're freezing gold. So Greg Popovich is no longer the coach of the San Antonio Spurs after 29 seasons. Of course he'd had some, I think he had a stroke and just had some major issues and now they say sir your services are no longer needed here but you can be the team president. They're in a really shitty spot. Like if you're San Antonio, if you're the Spurs, this is an

unenviable spot because this is a dude that won five championships and by every metric is one of the greatest coaches in the history of basketball and arguably one of the greatest coaches in the history of sport. 29 years in one place, five championships, put aside whatever you think about him politically or whatever he might think of you politically. He may think you're the biggest cocksucker on the planet. And based on the way he talks about shit, if you don't agree with him politically, he probably thinks you're a cocksucker. So

just keep that in mind. But like he and Steve Kerr probably get together and watch, you know, like Rachel Maddow together. They probably have like a group chat. In my mind, like Popovich and Steve Kerr, and maybe they've allowed like and maybe they've allowed like maybe they've allowed like JJ Reddick to slide into their group chat now and like LeBron and they all have a group chat and they all get like they all like run especially in the offseason they all get together and they're like hey did you guys see Rachel Maddow today hey guys look I don't know what you guys are doing right now but we have an emergency everybody go to Keith Olbermann's YouTube channel.

There's big shit happening right now. I repeat, this is not a drill. Go to Keith Olbermann's YouTube channel. Slides into the group chat, ping, you know, Steve Kerr picks up his phone and it's Popovich. He's like, you're never gonna guess who is on Stephen Colbert tonight. Who is on Stephen Colbert tonight? Elizabeth Warren is on, turn it on, Elizabeth Warren's on Colbert. I don't care that it's not comedy anymore. This is good shit. I need more injected into my veins. good shit. I need more injected into my veins. But anyway, so one of the greatest coaches of all time, that is undisputed,

you cannot dispute that. He is one of the great coaches of all time in any sport. You could argue if you did a Mount Rushmore and you had to include somebody from every major sport like the big four in the country, well, I guess he probably wouldn't be on it because there's other people like a Phil. I mean, Phil Jackson would have to be on it over him. But the one thing that's important to know, all right, if we're being fair, Phil Jackson won how many titles

was it? He won six with the Bulls and four with the Lakers. So he has 10 titles or 11 titles. I think he's got 10. So Phil Jackson has 10 titles. That's double the number of titles that Greg Popovich has. However, Greg Popovich did have an all-time great player in Tim Duncan, a guy who played a position that was far more valuable and the skill set he possessed was far more valuable in a bygone era than it is now. You could argue that winning a title, winning six titles with

Michael Jordan and winning four with Shaq and Kobe, I guess they won three with Shaq and Kobe and he won one with Pal Gasol and Kobe, right? One or two, I think it was one. I think Kobe's got four. I might be wrong on that. Either way, point being you could argue it's more impressive to win five titles with the guys that they had in San Antonio versus, you know, with Michael and Kobe and Shaq. You could argue that, but if you're just looking at sheer titles one, just the number, if you're looking at a number, then obviously somebody like Red Auerbach or somebody like, well, I mean, hell, you'd have to look at, you'd have to, no, I guess you wouldn't throw in Pat Riley. Pat, how many titles did Pat Riley win? Four? And he stole the one from Stan Van Gundy where he just hopped

in the middle of that Shaq season and was like, I'll be the coach now, Stan. Sit your ass down. It's like Steve Kerr. You'll never convince me that anybody else couldn't have gone in there with that team and won titles. Like, I don't think Steve Kerr has some special basketball mind by any means. Eventually, Mark Jackson could have won a title with that group. I feel. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. But if you had to have a Mount Rushmore and this Mount Rushmore had to have somebody from each

sport like who is the all-time greatest coach in each of these? Like you'd probably have to put Belichick. Well, see they put Lombardi. Like people get all hopped up on Lombardi stuff and, and we're in Title Town and Green Bay. How many Super Bowls has Green Bay won? Not all that many, like three or four. Is that their title right there? We're Title Town. Yeah, you want a bunch of fucking NFL titles before integration and shit, before the civil rights movement. Chill the fuck out on all your, you know, your, we're title town, you will say, we're Green Bay, right? But Popovich, now, let's eliminate the idea of a Mount

Rushmore of all sports and just look at the NBA, a Mount Rushmore of NBA coaches, then you would have to say that Greg Popovich would be on there. Five titles, dinky small town like San Antonio, which now has, you know, if you look at the city of San Antonio, it's in the top six or seven in terms of population in the city, which can be misleading. The Metro area is much smaller, but the city itself has a shitload of people in the city, but no other professional sports in the

major sports and San Antonio being able to do what he's done over the course of 30 years. It's actually fucking remarkable. You don't have to like the guy, but how many people would have been able to accomplish that in San Antonio? It's like, it's remarked now, if you look at what's happening now in the more recent history, they haven't made the playoffs and seems like in a decade almost, they haven't won a title in 1213 years. So things have obviously

changed. But like, San Antonio is right up there in like Oklahoma City, Memphis, like those type of markets in the NBA. To do what San Antonio has been able to do with Greg Popovich is fucking remarkable. We can sit here and shit on the guy. I don't like him for this. He's an asshole in press conferences. Blah, blah, blah, blah. This dude did something remarkable because you're going to be hard pressed in a sport like baseball, basketball. Like the NFL, there's parity all over

the NFL, so a city like Green Bay can have a great football team. Just like a city like Kansas City can have a great football team. St. Louis can win the Super Bowl in the NFL. Like you can look at these kind of smaller middling cities and they can be really good in football because that's the way football is structured and that's why football is king and that's why football rules. New Orleans can win a Super Bowl. And the NBA go down the list of teams that win championships.

Actually, that's a fun exercise. Let's look up the list. Let's go list of, not fat-fingered that one list of NBA champions and let's look at the cities that they come from right there will be one that will stand out in all of this but let's see champions let's scroll down into recent history let's even look so let's go to the the 80s when the NBA boom came back Los Angeles that's media market number two. Let's see. Boston, that's a top ten market. Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Detroit, Detroit, Chicago, Chicago, Chicago, Houston, Chicago, Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. And then boom, right there smack dab in the middle of it, 1999, the San Antonio Spurs.

Bang, the San Antonio Spurs. And that's, I don't know what the population was or what the market size for San Antonio was in 1999, probably much smaller than it is today. So you're champion, if you just, I look at things based on radio market size because that's just the profession I'm in. But if you looked at media markets, my guess would be that Boston, LA, Philadelphia, LA, Detroit, Detroit may have been on the outside of the top ten, but maybe right there. I mean they're right on the cusp. Chicago's a top two or three market. Houston's a top five, six, seven

market, depending on TV, radio, however you look at it, Chicago again, then boom there's San Antonio and then up Lakers three more times so market number two, bang bang bang, then the Spurs again, then Detroit again, then the Spurs again, then Miami. So going down the list of the teams that have won championships, then you throw in the Bucucks. I guess the Bucks would be the one that would stand out because that would be smaller than San Antonio. They're probably pretty close actually. Now I got to know because I know you're wondering

too. Let's look up media markets, media markets by size. All right. Here we go. In the United States, New York is number one, Los Angeles number two, Chicago number three. So markets two and three have won a shitload of titles in basketball in the last 40 some odd years. Philadelphia is number five, Houston is number six, Boston is number nine. Then of course you've got to look at Golden State, which is San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose. That's number 10. So let's scroll all the way down and see where we can find. And then you got, again, Cleveland counts, I guess, because of LeBron and

they've won. I left out Cleveland. Cleveland is in the top 20, but the top 20 would be larger than San Antonio, I would imagine. So then you've got Detroit, who is currently at number 14. Let's see where San Antonio ranks. San Antonio. We continue to scroll. San Antonio. I gotta be missing something here. Let's see. Where is San Antonio? There it is. Number 31. So what stands out there? Where's Milwaukee? It's got to be somewhere kind of around 31, if I had to guess. Maybe a little bit smaller. Milwaukee, where are you Milwaukee? Well, Memphis is number 51. So, it's the 51st. New Orleans is number 50. San Antonio is 31.

Milwaukee is 38. So, San Antonio is larger than Milwaukee. But remember that Milwaukee's championship in this modern era is a one-off to win five, five championships in San Antonio. Again, don't care what you think about the guy. He may hate you. You may hate him if you guys met. He'd probably think you're a giant piece of shit. If you like Donald Trump, he no doubt thinks you're a scumbag. That's fine. But five championships in San Antonio is remarkable. It's not just great. It's not

just, oh, that's cool. This is the NBA. Look at historically the cities that win. LA, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Detroit. These are the cities that historically win titles in the NBA that win the most, consistently win the most titles. San Francisco now in the more recent era. And you're talking about San Antonio. It's remarkable. In a way, it's kind of remarkable in a way like that St. Louis is so good at baseball or was so good at baseball. Now it's a little bit different obviously because they're not and they've got a great history

of baseball. But how many small market teams in baseball win a bunch of World Series? Same thing, modern era over the last if you want to look back dating back to the 80s who's winning World Series, right? Let's see, Boston's won World Series, the Yankees have won a lot of World Series in that stretch. The Phillies have won the World Series in that stretch a couple times. You'll have some outliers, but those are two sports where by and large the larger giant media

markets and the teams that have more money for media rights deals, etcetera, win because it is not a league like the NFL where everybody kind of plays by the same rules and there's a cap and everything else. These other sports, it is not a league like the NFL where everybody kind of plays by the same rules and there's a cap and everything else. These other sports, it is difficult to win in smaller markets. It's difficult to get big talent to come to smaller markets. Do you think someone's signing up to go play in Memphis unless they get drafted there? Tell me how

many marquee free agents have gone to Memphis. I'm talking marquee, you know, not guys like even a guy like whenever they were able to bring in Zach Randolph. Zach Randolph wasn't a trade. I think he was a sign but Mark Gasol who eventually won defensive player of the year was a trade. I think that was a trade for his brother to LA. But cities like Memphis, like unless you get a LeBron in Cleveland, you ain't going to win shit in Cleveland, right? Like that's I know that they're winning games now, but like

it's Cleveland. You know, you're not going to get mega stars in a lot of these kind of cities anymore. So to win five championships and to do it with like the quietest kind of like not obscure superstar, but you're not talking about winning it with super duper incredible guard play over the course of these 30 years. You're doing it with a big dog, the big fundamental right there in the

heart of all of it. I know you've had other guys in there that have helped you along the way throughout the years. You know, you've had Kawhi and guys like that, but like big picture. You could argue Big picture, you could argue that Greg Popovich winning five titles in San Antonio is the greatest coaching accomplishment that anyone's ever had. Like, okay, Belichick's won a bunch of Super Bowls. That's Boston, big market. Now, they had never won anything before he got there. They had gone to the Super Bowl twice, lost the Super Bowl twice, but big picture, they've been kind of a waste of an organization. That's

a great accomplishment. But in the NFL, you can go almost anywhere. Kansas City was a sleeping giant for a long time. What does Andy Reid do? He goes there and wins a bunch of titles. That's Kansas City. That's not a huge place. Dick Vermeel goes to St. Louis. They won a Super Bowl. These things are possible in the NFL. Just based on history, these are not things that, like look at the number of teams that have won Super Bowls over that same stretch. Different teams that have won Super Bowls.

And where they come from. Again, LA Raiders won the Super Bowl. The Philadelphia Eagles have won the Super Bowl. Those are two big markets. St. Louis has won a Super Bowl. Kansas City has won Super Bowls. You. Kansas City has won Super Bowls. Dallas has won Super Bowls, but it's wide ranging. New York Giants have won Super Bowls. You get the point I'm trying to make here.

In the NFL, everybody seems, at least in their mind, to have a shot to win something. Cincinnati's gone to Super Bowls. Those things happen. In a sport like basketball, which has been dominated essentially by a handful of cities for the last 40 years, what he did in making his city and his team, one of them is fucking remarkable. It's very, it's amazing. San Antonio is in a rough spot, though, because like they could never fire the guy. And they have not been good. I mean, we talk about how great things were for about the first 20 years of it.

Things have been a waste. They've been bad since, I mean, they've made the playoffs last in 2017 maybe? So they've been damn near a decade without the playoffs. But when you've got someone who's accomplished that much and has that much cache in a city, it is tough to move on from that. I mean, look, I mean, do you think they wanted to have to fire Bill Belichick in New England? Maybe, maybe they didn't like him. But like, did they really want it to end that way?

Your San Antonio, smaller market team, dude has it one in 10 years. It's a tough spot they were in because like what there is something to be said about once you run off a legend, who replaces them and what does that team do, right? It happened with Georgia for a while, you know, when they whacked Mark Richt. Mark Richt had a great run at Georgia and then it was kind of like will Georgia ever win anything? Now, Georgia is a powerhouse, but like Mark Richt was a great run at Georgia and then it was kind of like will Georgia ever win anything? Now, Georgia's a powerhouse but like Mark Richt was very good at Georgia. You know, be careful what you wish for when you fire people

because you run off the guys that are successful and then you never reach that again. Like San Antonio, no one's ever going to do what they did again. I don't believe. Certainly not San Antonio but they've been in a tough spot this entire time because you're stuck with that, you know, like, hey, we want to move on from this guy because it's not really good anymore, but he's accomplished so much and he's got a ton of value in the fan base. If we fire him, we lose a lot of goodwill with the fans. It's a public, it's a publicity nightmare. Like, what do we do? So now they've sort of gotten to get out of jail free card because the dude's health issues that sounds crass but it's how it is. So now they just kind of bump him up to being the president of basketball operations and you never really have to hear from him again they'll bring in a new coach and they'll start a new era of the Spurs but for the last nine years if you're the Spurs and you're the people above Greg Popovich you're like what do we

fucking do? You know 29 years is a hell of a run. How many other coaches have coached the same place consecutively for 29 years? I can't imagine it's many. Let me look that up. Coaches who have had the longest tenure, Connie Mack, Philadelphia Athletics, 1901 to 1950. This son of a bitch coached 50 consecutive years in the early 1900s, where I would imagine the lifespan was barely 50 years old for a man. This guy coached 50 years in baseball. Way to go, Connie Mack. Not that I have not heard the name Connie Mack.

I know who the person, I know the motherfucker coached the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 fucking years. Holy shit. That's pretty fucking remarkable. Now that'll never happen again. Unless some guy starts coaching when he's 20 and coaches till he's 70. I mean, that's basically, that's never going to fucking happen. It's obviously never going to happen again. Hell, I've been Belichick coach for what 2425 years with the Patriots 24 years, I guess. Consecutively. These things are never going to happen again with all the movement and everything. Everybody does. It's never going to happen.

That is truly remarkable 50 years, but 29 years is remarkable in San Antonio. So there you go. No more Greg Popovich on the sidelines more to come.