NBA Salutes Living Legend Gregg Popovich with Coach of the Year Award

According to Mike Monroe of the San Antonio Express-News, the Coach of the Year race has been formally decided and awaits only official announcement that San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich will take home his second such award. 

Popovich has had a tremendously successful career, but as the criteria for these annual awards is supposedly focused on a single season, let's hone in a bit on our praise.

Put simply: Pop has coached as well as anyone in the league this year, and his combination of in-game strategy, big-picture logic, team balance, necessary evolution and roster maintenance has gone unmatched.

Tom Thibodeau may have done more with less in Chicago, but the artfulness with which Popovich guided his team through several very different transitions deserves specific praise.

So consider this post—and this award—as a celebration of a great coach rather than the "snubbing" of another great one. No matter who took home the hardware this year, another brilliant basketball mind would be left trophyless.

That it so happened to be Popovich in the impending press release is nice, just as it would have been with Thibodeau. But the voters broke in the Spurs' favor and took on particular admiration for the work done in San Antonio this season.

And work it was.

Popovich deserves ample credit for transitioning his offense to fit Tony Parker's strengths more precisely, but the more impressive feat is his management of every Spurs player outside the big three. Pop has established such a trusting culture that he can fiddle with minutes and roles on a game-to-game basis without the potential for backlash.

The DNP-CD cycle among Spurs bigs would be unheard of on most teams in the league, but Popovich navigates player-coach relations so expertly that there isn't even the slightest problem.

DeJuan Blair, Tiago Splitter, Matt Bonner and now Boris Diaw all slide into place as dictated by particular matchups and strategic approaches, just as Stephen Jackson, Gary Neal, Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green fall perfectly into place on the wing around and behind Manu Ginobili.

There isn't a peep to be heard from an unhappy role player—merely the constant buzzing of an offense in motion and a team structured to be as dynamic as possible.

Coaching in the NBA isn't as simple as drawing up winning sets, or even as simple as managing winning talents. There's a perpetual give and take in a number of different dimensions, and no coach manages that array of tasks and responsibilities better than Popovich.

This trophy likely means nothing to a man so consumed with the value of process over specific gain, but the announcement of this award is—if nothing else—a convenient opportunity to gush about one of the best of our time and the best of all time.