Gregg Popovich Rips ‘Soft’ Spurs Following Loss to Miami Heat


After the Heat stormed back (behind 68% shooting and connecting on 12 threes in the second half), San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich was not pleased with last night’s outcome in Miami, to say the least. From the Express-News: “For the better part of a month, Gregg Popovich’s instincts have been to comfort. As his young team, playing without its best player, continued to falter on the road, he spared the rod in favor of an encouraging pat on the backside. Tuesday night at American?Airlines Arena, in the moments after the Miami Heat turned on an all-out second-half blitz to send the Spurs tumbling to a 120-98 defeat, Popovich made one thing evident to his players. There would be no more Mr. Nice Pop. ‘I thought in the second half they got real physical, and I thought we folded,’ Popovich said. ‘The physicality killed us. We had nobody that stepped up. We let the physicality beat us in a lot of different ways — whether it was cuts, or passing or boards. It didn’t matter what it was. Their physicality put us in a ditch. They beat our ass in the second half. We should be embarrassed by that, playing that soft.'”