San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich has decided to open up on politics yet again. This time, he believes that NFL owners who support President Trump are hypocrites. Popovich is uniquely qualified to give this analysis considering his own hypocrisy and cowardice on the NBA’s China problem.
Popovich has arguably been the most intense among NBA figures in his hatred for Trump, going all the way back to the 2016 election. On top of calling Trump an embarrassment to the world and a soulless coward, among other things, he’s now added Trump-supporting owners to his list of grievances. “It’s just hypocritical,” Popovich said. “It’s incongruent. It doesn’t make sense. People aren’t blind. Do you go to your staff and your players and talk about injustices and democracy and how to protest? I don’t get it. I think they put themselves in a position that’s untenable.”
But untenable positions are an area of expertise for Popovich. The NBA promoted his political musings on its website in 2018 in a piece titled “San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is comfortable speaking out about politics and race, even when it makes others uncomfortable.” Party lines are not his focus, the piece says, and empathy often marks his way. And yet, when the moment came and NBA figures cowered over giving offense to China, Popovich lacked any empathy for the genuinely oppressed people of Hong Kong in their struggle against Chinese tyranny.
Popovich had nothing to say about China during the crisis, not even mentioning China once. Instead, he praised NBA commissioner Adam Silver for his “courage” in dodging the issue and pivoted instead to more Trump-bashing. Silver’s “courageous” response has been to say that people from China and America will “have different viewpoints on different issues” — evidently, one of those issues of disagreement was the bit about China destroying freedom in Hong Kong and oppressing its own citizens in mainland China. Popovich then doubled down, claiming that Trump was too friendly to the regimes of Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — an absurd tu quoque that hardly absolves him or Silver of their obeisance to China.
The conservative estimate for the NBA’s revenue from China comes in at $500 million, a number that helps set the league’s salary cap. Popovich is as outspoken on politics as anyone in the league, and like so many others, he falls quiet at the first mention of the brutal tyranny that helps bankroll his salary. It’s just hypocritical, and it puts himself in a position that’s untenable.
