Don Newman played seven seasons in the Canadian Football League and went to training camp with two NFL teams. It makes sense that one of his duties as a Spurs assistant coach is to corral Gregg Popovich when the head coach seems intent on carrying an argument with the referees to the point of ejection.
Nevertheless, it took gang-tackling to contain Popovich during Tuesday night’s Spurs-Hornets Westen Conference semifinal game at New Orleans Arena when he got into it with referee Joey Crawford.
Newman had the first “hit” on Popovich in an attempt to steer him away from Crawford. In football terms, he failed to wrap him up. By the time Robert Horry and Manu Ginobili piled on, Crawford already had decided Popovich deserved a technical foul.
That Popovich’s ire was sparked by a relatively meaningless violation he believed had been misinterpreted by Crawford couldn’t stop the blood from rushing to his face or keep him from breaking from Newman’s grasp. He thought Crawford had misapplied a rule about how players line up for free throws and refused to back down from his position.
The technical foul cost the Spurs only one point, but Ginobili said that one reason for the Spurs’ second-half collapse was their preoccupation with the officiating afterward.
According to Ginobili, lobbying the referees is part of Popovich’s job description.
The players, he said, should just play.
“Pop is allowed to do that because he knows the league a lot.” Ginobili said after the Hornets put the Spurs on the brink of playoff elimination with a 101-79 victory in Game 5. “I think we got too worried about refs way too much.”
New Orleans upped its defensive intensity in the third quarter Tuesday and made the game more physical. The Spurs, though, didn’t shoot a free throw in the period, and only four in the second half.
In Ginobili’s view, the Spurs responded less with physicality and aggression. Instead, he said, they settled for wasted whining.
“We talked too much,” Ginobili said. “We’ve just got to let Pop do that. We know he’s going to get a technical. He’s going to get upset. He’s going to talk to them. But it’s his job. We’ve just got to be more focused on playing, not say a word, and keep fighting.”
Popovich agreed with his erstwhile sixth man about the players’ occasional preoccupation with the referees, but put the focus on the Hornets’ stellar defense and the onus on his team to respond more appropriately.
“That game had to do with New Orleans’ defense in the third quarter,” Popovich said, while agreeing the Spurs wasted too much emotion on perceived injustice. “I know everybody wants to try and make it something different, or pick at this that. But they deserve credit for that. They did it very well.”
The coach did some off-day lobbying about the officiating while discussing some of the hard hits absorbed by point guard Tony Parker in the second half of Game 5.
“There is no gauge to show you, on a scale of 1 to 10, how hard he got hit, or this and that,” Popovich said. “One thing we didn’t expect was the disparity, free-throw-wise. We’ve got to figure out a way to get to the line.
“Timmy (Duncan) took 18 shots and shot one free throw. They shot 13 free throws in the third quarter, and we shot zero. I thought we were at the rim as much as they were. So we have got to figure out how to get to the line. That (disparity) is not something you expect. You figure that will probably even itself out in a game. But that’s one of those things you hope will be pretty much a wash. That’s not something we expected last night. That hurt us, not getting to the line.”
mikemonroe@express-news.net