Gregg Popovich mentioned he has no regrets for asking the house crowd of the San Antonio Spurs to not boo Kawhi Leonard throughout Wednesday’s recreation.
“Completely not,” Popovich mentioned Friday night time. “It is fairly straightforward to grasp. I listened to it for some time and it simply acquired louder and louder and uglier and uglier, and I felt sorry for him, and I used to be embarrassed for our metropolis, for our group.
“As a result of that is not who we’re, that is not how we have performed ourselves for the final 25 years. It is the alternative of the way in which we have performed ourselves, the way in which we have labored in the neighborhood.”
Leonard was traded by the Spurs to the Toronto Raptors in 2018.
“It is type of a sign of the world we stay in as we speak. It was hateful,” Popovich mentioned. “It was actually disrespectful, it was simply mean-spirited. We are the group that when any person comes again to city after having been a Spur, so that you first come again to city, we present a video of them. I can keep in mind when Kawhi and Danny Inexperienced got here again from Toronto, we confirmed movies of these guys and the gang did not react like that. That tells the entire story, and now it is 5 years later, six years later, and that is going to occur.”