By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Working under Gregg Popovich can certainly be a challenge for any player, from rookie to veteran, that joins the San Antonio Spurs. But Davis Bertans was already appropriately toughened up from his pre-NBA days.
Before signing with the Spurs back in 2016, the 25-year-old Latvian forward had played for some rather strict coaches (especially from former Yugoslavia) in Europe. In an interview with Hoopshype, he recalled these experiences, particularly the time he spent under Dusko Vujosevic in Partizan Belgrade.
Per Hoopshype:
“Is Popovich similar to any coach you’ve had in Europe as far as character and the way he interacts with players?
DB: I’ve played for a bunch of coaches and there’s no one similar. I think he’s one of a kind. In Europe, there’s some who don’t want you to play your game and can’t live with the other team scoring a single basket in a game (laughs). There’s often this situation where the other team scores 1-2-3 in a row and the coach is is super unhappy about it. Here, with the experience coach Pop has, he knows preventing the other team from scoring all the time is not possible. Defensively, he wants us to do the best we can and as long as we do that, it’s fine. It’s just “stay in front of your guys and make his shot the toughest possible and hopefully, it doesn’t go in.”
You had a pretty interesting guy as head coach in Partizan Belgrade in Dule Vujosevic, who we have seen do pretty crazy things. Do you have any crazy story about him?
DB: (Laughs) That’s another one-of-a-kind coach. Me and (Kings guard Bogdan) Bogdanovic spent a looooooot of extra hours after practices with coach Dule. At that age, it really helped a lot. The former Yugoslavia countries’ mentality has some craziness in it. He’s definitely a character, but all he did was care for his players a lot and you kind of look at it that way. When he’s yelling at you, of course you’re not happy about it, but he did care about his players. He would have us stay after practice shooting shots coming off screens and we couldn’t leave without making 10 threes in a row sometimes. Other times you would have to shoot wearing garden gloves, there was stuff like that (laughs). There were a lot of different things, but at the end of the day, it helped us a lot.”