The many legacies of Žarko Paspalj, part two
A look inside the lone Spurs season for Gregg Popovich's first overseas project.
For at least a month, the floorboards in our kitchen have felt like they’re sinking, which is understandable given the house is a hundred years old and that time eventually grinds us all down. Less forgivable is the fact that I’ve gone there countless times, either in broad daylight or in the quiet, clumsy dark, felt that unsettling dip under the ball of my foot and done nothing about it; I've said that I would, and I will, really, but I haven’t yet and that’s really the singular point. If we’re all defined at least in part by our bad habits, I must recognize one of mine is to compartmentalize and ignore my problems and that it may figuratively or literally pull me under somewhere down the line.
This is all to say that while I hoped a deep dive into the multitudinous Žarko Paspalj would completely contradict the shorthand version that is almost entirely about pizza and cigarettes and maybe tell us something about the way we oversimplify certain figures, the stories that follow do indeed include both pizza and cigarettes.
Our story picks up with Paspalj at the start of the 1989-90 NBA season, which historically marks a sea change in San Antonio. Following a franchise-worst 21 wins the year before, the Spurs roster saw an overhaul, which included finally welcoming David Robinson, the prize of the 1987 Draft, as well as adding 1989 third-overall-pick Sean Elliott and All-Star Terry Cummings, acquired in a trade from Milwaukee.
Despite the language barrier, Paspalj is by all accounts well-liked among his teammates. Forum posts reference a 2006 mySA article that’s since been scrubbed about Cummings tweaking the old Zorro theme song to ‘The Mark of Zarko’:
Onto the floor when the Spurs need to score,
Comes a forward known as Zarko,
When the game gets tight,
The opponents take flight,
When they catch the sight of Zarko,
They say from Europe he came,
To play the American game,
The Z in his name is for Zarko,
Zarko, the hoopster they all come to see
Zarko, who’s known by the sign of the Z
Still, in a turn of events that was predictable to most people except himself, Paspalj is immediately slotted behind Elliott in the depth chart at small forward, seeing the floor almost exclusively in garbage time. His role is nothing like it was on either his national team or with Partizan, and his Basketball Reference numbers reflect it, his most telling stat perhaps the 7.4 fouls per 36 minutes he averages whenever he does see action.
It may be the NBA learning curve that influences Spurs head coach Larry Brown’s decision, or the optics of Paspalj’s reportedly three-pack-a-day smoking habit, perhaps more brazen than the many other players who smoked at that time. Brown has also been known—he argues, unjustly—for rarely playing rookies and, at times, international players. (Brown also tells Paspalj that he envisions him more as a 4 rather than a 3, and tells him he has an offseason plan in mind to work on the transition.) Regardless of the reason, it’s hard to fault Brown’s approach to minutes, given he was busy integrating Elliott, Robinson, and Cummings, and helped usher in the best turnaround in the team’s history at the time. Even with his future success, it’s not likely that Paspalj dramatically improves upon that.
Nonetheless, the young forward’s frustrations mount, believing he’s often outplayed Elliott in practices and that the high-dollar rookie from Arizona is being given more slack in games. He vents mostly with Popovich instead of Brown, the assistant feeling a responsibility for having brought Paspalj into this situation and who preaches patience and spends time with him in between games. (It’s worth considering that Popovich had recently come from coaching college basketball at D-III Pomona-Pitzer, where he took to recruiting and becoming personally invested in his players)
One such occasion is during a road trip in Boston. Paspalj remembers Popovich waking him in his hotel room, saying he has a solution; that he’s found someone who will hypnotize him into quitting smoking. Despite Paspalj’s protests, Popovich insists. (For some extra color: imagine a wintry Massachusetts backdrop for this; going by the lone game at the Celtics on the 89-90 schedule, this would’ve taken place in the middle of January.)
As the story goes, the two take a cab—Paspalj staring out into the distance, Popovich still appreciably excited, based on the former player’s account—to a rehab clinic in Cambridge. In the middle of the clinic is a garden, and in the garden is a large concrete ash tray, a symbol of where those who aim to quit smoking are to put out their last cigarette before going on. “This is bullshit,” Paspalj remembers saying.
They’re greeted by a Russian hypnotherapist, who Paspalj can communicate with, having learned Russian in primary school. (There is a decent chance based on his description, location and the nature of his interaction with Paspalj that the hypnotherapist is Yefim “The Mad Russian” Shubentsov, but Jovanović couldn’t confirm) Popovich waits inside. The process goes on for 10 minutes, Paspalj closing his eyes and then, after some words and gestures by the hypnotherapist, being told he’s cured. His cigarette habit was no more.
As he’s reunited with Popovich, Paspalj recalls his coach’s elation being like that of scoring a goal in the 90th minute of a soccer game. For those of us whose singular mental image of Popovich is that of a grey furrowed brow ethering a reporter on live TV over a question about transition defense, this is an endearing thought. It also may speak to where the pair were in their relationship, roughly half a year after the player touched down in San Antonio. At the risk of over-projecting, one can imagine that Popovich’s investment in Paspalj kicking his habit was both personal and professional, vastly improving his outlook both in the NBA and on Larry Brown’s Spurs, not to mention his pulmonary health. Such a positive development, taking place over a quick east-coast road trip, would’ve been a coup for Popovich on multiple levels.
His good vibes, however, are short-lived. They leave the building and hail a cab, presumably to head back to the hotel. Before entering, Paspalj decides to test the effectiveness of the hypnotherapy. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a smoke and takes a drag, seemingly feeling no different than before. As Paspalj recalls the moment, the joy “evaporates” from Popovich’s face replaced by an “end of the world expression.”
Moments like that may capture a bit of Paspalj’s essence, his talents flanked and occasionally subverted by various pleasures and a well-meaning aloofness. Milos Jovanović, who interviewed Paspalj in 2015, spoke of a Partizan team trip for the inaugural Euroleague Final Four, in which he arrived in Gent without a passport, depending on the swift intervention from Yugoslav embassy staff in order to legally remain in the country. While reportedly on good behavior throughout his time as a Spur, his reputation as a partier was well-established around Europe, where he was known to stay out until 6am only to score 40-plus points in a game that same day.
Paspalj recalls one fleeting opportunity that season. It took place on that same road trip, as the team traveled from Boston to New York to play the Knicks. Having not played against the Celtics, Paspalj had similar expectations for that night’s matchup, and was whiling away in his NYC hotel room, eating Dominoes Pizza with a friend in the late afternoon. Through a phone call from Popovich he learned that Elliott had hurt himself in morning shootaround and that he would be getting his first NBA start. Over the course of that game and the next, in Denver, he wastes few of his touches, attempting 18 FGs in a combined 27 minutes. He’ll eventually finish fourth in the team in usage rate, partially as a result, but see little playing time after that.
In the lead-up to the trade deadline Paspalj asked—“begged,” he says—Popovich and Brown to be moved, with rumors of a potential deal to the more Euro-friendly Warriors a possibility. Instead the Spurs sent another little-used import over, swapping Christian Welp for Uwe Blab. (Welp indeed saw his minutes increase playing under Don Nelson but would nonetheless be out of the NBA by next season) A month later, Paspalj was waived, just ahead of the team’s playoff run. Naturally it’s Popovich who breaks the news to him, visibly disappointed, and Popovich who drives him to the airport with the same heavy heart—a feeling Paspalj admitted to not sharing at the time, as it meant a return to Europe and a fresh start.
While that marked the end of Paspalj’s NBA career, it was anything but for the relationship between the two. Popovich has routinely made offseason trips to the Balkans, some of which have been footnotes in stories here and there. In 2004, ahead of the Olympics, Popovich scheduled a handful of friendly games in Europe, including one in Belgrade, where he and Larry Brown met with Paspalj for dinner. In the summer of 2013, as Popovich was getting over one of the great gut punches in Finals history, the coach paid a visit to Montenegro and went for a backroads tour with Paspalj. It’s in that human connection where similarities between Paspalj and his international successors in San Antonio—the Tonys and Manus that followed—reveal themselves, an early calling card for the way Popovich coached and got the most out of his players. Said Paspalj in 2015: “We never lost touch… I look at him only as Gregg.”
In June 2014, Paspalj, aboard a raft on the banks of the Sava River, drank with friends and cheered on as San Antonio completed its redemptive dispatching of the Heat. By the time the on-court ceremony had ended, around 8 in the morning in Belgrade, Paspalj had already texted the coach to congratulate him. Sure enough, some 20 minutes after the coach was interviewed on live TV, his phone rang. It was “Gregg.”
Now 54, Paspalj’s work with entities like the Olympics and Basketball Without Borders is another touchpoint that reunites him with Popovich. He’s also been hospitalized by multiple heart attacks and a stroke, the latter happening during a 2017 visit to his former coach in San Antonio. He no longer smokes cigarettes as a result—doctor’s orders proving slightly more effective than the Russian hypnotherapist in Cambridge some 30 years ago. He just vapes instead.