Building up a champion

When you've been been singing the same songs year after year like Springsteen has done, or reading the same lines of Shakespeare as Olivier used to do, or coaching the same principles for a dozen seasons as Gregg Popovich is doing today in San Antonio, doesn't the work grow tiresome? How do you find new perspective and inspiration from the same simple job performed a thousand times already?

Olivier is no longer with us and Springsteen was unavailable to comment, but here is Popovich at 59. His defending champion Spurs are the NBA's oldest team, dealing with injuries and fatigue and new potential challenges from the reinvented Lakers, Suns and Celtics, and never mind the Mavericks, Pistons, Jazz, Nuggets and Hornets

"They've been through it so much and they know how difficult it is,'' Popovich said of his players and their pursuit of Tim Duncan's fifth championship. "They know that peaking early or being super-excited early is really fool's gold. If people know how difficult it is, then you really don't want to face it until you have to face it. And you do what you have to do to hang in there, but you're not going to let all stops go until it's time to do it. Because it's a tough road.''

Let's say the Spurs are operating at maybe 75 percent of capacity. Yet in the playoffs -- if they're able to recreate their play of last spring -- they'll suddenly look as hungry as a team that's never won anything. This is not to say that they're coasting through the regular season. They are instead building toward the postseason.

There must be many secrets to remaining young as the work grows old, and for Popovich one fundamental principle is to view the 82-game schedule as a lab of experiment. As few other coaches are able or willing to do, he turns NBA games into high-intensity practices. He assembles odd lineups to see how well they mix together in a variety of situations. Just now Matt Bonner has been benched in the middle of a fine season in order to provide minutes to Robert Horry, to learn what he can do. To see the Spurs play in February is to be invited behind the curtains to their rehearsal for the playoffs. This is the way Popovich has been running the Spurs since their first championship season after the lockout in 1999.

"I always felt that what was most important going into the playoffs was our health and our energy,'' he said. "At that point [in 1999], David [Robinson] was on the backside of his career, and so it was important to make sure that we didn't overplay him. Avery [Johnson] was on the backside of his career, Mario Elie was on the backside of his career, Sean Elliott was on the backside of his career. So from the beginning our concern has been on our health and energy, and then with that trying to be playing the best basketball we could play. And that always meant keeping minutes down, and taking the hits now and then if you're going to lose a game because of it -- but to have all of those things in place for the playoffs. It's not something that I manufactured, but something that seemed like the way it had to be done because of the personnel.

"And now it's pretty similar with Timmy and Horry and Bruce [Bowen] and Fin [ Michael Finley] -- these guys are older now. It's still the same dynamic.''

And yet at least twice last year Popovich publicly wondered if he had lost the attention of his team, if it had grown tired of his demands. "I said it when we were 14th in the league in field-goal-percentage defense,'' he said. "It was both an honest and a dishonest statement at the same time. Because on the one hand we were playing so inconsistently defensively, and since that's who we are, I had to be wondering if they were still listening or if the message had gotten old and they were taking me for granted or they're tired of hearing it. And that was the honest part.

"The dishonest part was I thought it would still be good to mention publicly, to give them a little kick in the pants as a group -- not to anybody individually -- to realize that, hey, you guys are way off the mark. And in that sense possibly they would listen to what was going on.''

Look where the Spurs are today: ranked 14th in field-goal-percentage defense. Asked if his team should be judged based on its current play, Popovich admitted, "Probably not.''