How Far Can Becky Hammon Go in the N.B.A.?

It was August, 2012, and Becky Hammon, the point guard of the Silver Stars, San Antonio’s franchise in the W.N.B.A., was on her way home from the London Olympics. While waiting to board a connecting flight in Atlanta, she spotted the craggy face of Gregg Popovich, the head coach of the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs. Popovich is widely considered one of the greatest coaches of all time, and is known for a capacity to inspire selfless team play even among players of colossal ego. One of his many fans, Barack Obama, has said that if he were a free agent in the N.B.A. he’d sign with Popovich. Hammon was far less famous, but Popovich was an admirer, and he recognized her, too. He had been watching her play since 2007, the year before she led the Silver Stars to the W.N.B.A. Finals. From time to time during the next few seasons, Popovich would call or text Dan Hughes, the Silver Stars’ coach, with comments about her performance.

Though only five feet six, Hammon was a commanding presence on the court: gum-snapping, energetic, her quick cuts and jab steps to the basket punctuated by a swishing ponytail. She could slip through a narrow space between two defenders and drive to the hoop, scooping a shot that would skim the rim and slide through the net. Like Magic Johnson, she flipped no-look passes over her shoulder, and, like Stephen Curry, she hit shots from half-court. But Popovich was most struck by her prowess as a court general: she had an uncanny ability to direct her teammates around the floor. “I’d watch the game, and the only thing I could see—it’s an exaggeration, I mean, but—was Becky’s aura, her leadership, her effect on teammates, her effect on the crowd, the way she handled herself,” Popovich told me. “She was, like, the ultimate leader. Energy, juice, vitality. At the same time, she was doing intelligent things on the court, making decisions that mattered.” In the N.B.A., a woman in charge was almost unthinkable, but he was considering hiring her.

Hammon and Popovich managed to sit together on the flight to San Antonio. They talked until the plane touched down, but not about basketball. He wasn’t interested in whether she could diagram a play. Popovich has a more character-driven view of coaching—and of coaches. “I wanted to find out who she was,” he said. “What did she think? How intelligent is she? How worldly? What goes through her mind? My ulterior motive, if that’s the way to put it, was that I wanted to find out whether she had the interest and the tools to be a leader, to run a team.”

Rebecca Lynn Hammon, who is now forty-one, was born in Rapid City, South Dakota. She has a heart-shaped face framed by chestnut hair that falls below her shoulders, and she speaks in a cheerful, sincere voice with a Midwestern accent. She was raised, and remains, a devout Christian. She is unapologetically American. And yet at the London Olympics, she told Popovich, she had played in a red uniform for the Russian Federation. Four years earlier, she’d been passed over for the U.S. team’s first round of tryouts for the Beijing Olympics, and Russia had offered her a spot on its national team; she also played in a Russian league. Popovich, who had been a Soviet-studies major at the Air Force Academy, was fascinated. He told Hammon about touring the Soviet Union with the U.S. Armed Forces basketball team in the seventies, and, as she drank a beer, she told him what it was like to live in Moscow and to lead players who were, at first, wary of an American teammate. “I was a proud, arrogant American,” she later recounted. “But, at the end of the day, you live in the world with billions of people, and everyone has a unique upbringing and experience.” Hammon had become a naturalized Russian citizen in order to play in Moscow—a difficult decision. Some Americans called her a traitor. Even the U.S. head coach, Anne Donovan, said that she was unpatriotic, though later she backed off, saying, “I hold no grudge, and more power to her.”

As their flight neared its end, Popovich could barely conceal his interest. He said, “So, if I ever hired you and I asked you something, you’d tell me the truth?”

Hammon found the question curious. “I don’t know why else you’d ask if you didn’t want me to tell the truth,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “I don’t want a bunch of yes-men.”

The following year, Hammon suffered a torn A.C.L., a season-ending injury. While she recovered, she asked Popovich whether she could sit in on a few Spurs practices. The team is famously reluctant to grant access to outsiders, but he agreed. Soon, she was attending coaches’ meetings and film sessions, analyzing games and discussing strategy. To the untutored eye, basketball seems infinitely more improvisational than football, in which each play is conveyed in a kind of committee meeting, the huddle. And yet both the offensive and the defensive sides of basketball involve extensive planning and preparation. The most gifted coaches, like Popovich—or, in their time, Red Auerbach, of the Celtics; Red Holzman, of the Knicks; and Phil Jackson, of the Lakers and the Bulls—can make even the greatest soloists harmonize with their teammates. By the end of the season, in the spring of 2014, Popovich noticed that Hammon was confident enough to argue with him about the finer points of, say, offensive ball movement and floor spacing. “That’s when I knew, if I had an opportunity, I wanted to put her on staff,” Popovich said.

That summer, Hammon retired from the W.N.B.A., and the Spurs announced that they had hired her as an assistant coach, making her the first full-time female coach in big-time American men’s sports. Popovich and his general manager, R. C. Buford, insist that they had no intention of making a political statement. “It has nothing to do with her being a woman. She happens to be a woman,” Popovich said.

But professional sports are the last major area of American culture in which the segregation of the sexes is not only tolerated but sanctioned. On the field, the ice, and the court, the reasons are obvious: differences in size and strength can make it difficult for female athletes to compete against their male counterparts. In the famed Battle of the Sexes, in 1973, Billie Jean King caused a sensation when she crushed Bobby Riggs, but King, at twenty-nine, was in her prime, while Riggs was fifty-five. Few, if any, tennis fans believe that King could have defeated Jimmy Connors or Arthur Ashe. But sex discrimination on the sidelines is also taken as a matter of course—at least when it comes to women coaching men. (Men coaching women is common in the professional and the college ranks.) On social media and sports talk radio, the reasons that women could never coach men are presented as if they were as inevitable as differences in testosterone levels: women won’t tolerate the locker-room culture; men’s teams are “more athletic” than women’s, making them incomprehensible to the female imagination; and women simply cannot command young men. Mike Francesa, one of the most popular sports-radio hosts in the country, once said of Hammon, “What would qualify her to be a coach, on a professional level, of a men’s team?” He added, “It’s not even something that would make sense to aspire to.” Nearly half a century after Title IX, the belief persists: women cannot coach men, particularly at the professional level.

By hiring Hammon, Popovich challenged the idea that the best male athletes in the world would be diminished by the leadership of a woman. “I was, like, Hallelujah,” Julie Foudy, a former captain of the U.S. women’s national soccer team and an ESPN analyst, told me. Also among those who cheered the decision was Adam Silver, the slender, savvy lawyer who has been the commissioner of the N.B.A. since 2014. While the N.F.L. struggles to position itself between its activist players and its more conservative fans, Silver has expressed a desire to make the N.B.A. progressive and inclusive—a league of the woke. Silver first made his political mark by forcing out the owner of the L.A. Clippers, who had been caught on tape making racist remarks. Silver has supported star players like LeBron James and Stephen Curry in criticizing Donald Trump. Two years ago, Popovich attended New York’s gay-pride parade and saw Silver riding an N.B.A. float. In October, Silver hired a retired Air Force lieutenant general named Michelle D. Johnson as the head of referee operations. “It’s not inclusion for its own sake, or diversity for its own sake,” he told me. “It’s the consequence of expanding the pool of candidates.” Last year, he said that he expected to see a female head coach “sooner rather than later.”

James said last week that he and his teammates on the Cleveland Cavaliers would welcome a female head coach. “If she knows what she’s doing, we’ll love it,” he said. “I mean, listen, at the end of the day, basketball, it’s not about male or female. If you know the game, you know the game.” Many people speculate that Hammon will be the N.B.A.’s first female head coach, not least because she has Popovich’s support. Talking to Hammon, though, I was struck by her ambivalence about her role as a pioneer. She recognizes that she is an inspiration for many young women, and a target for many wary men. At the same time, she resists the attention to her gender. “If you don’t want a female coach, don’t hire one!” she said, with some exasperation. But, she continued, if “you want to hire somebody who’s qualified and will do a good job, then maybe you should consider me.” Like Popovich, Hammon believes that coaching involves more than drawing up plays or breaking down defensive schemes. “You shouldn’t get into coaching unless you care about the people you’re leading,” she said. That doesn’t fit the popular image of a successful coach—your Belichicks and Lombardis. But it is, as it happens, the philosophy of the Spurs.

As a kid growing up in South Dakota, Becky Hammon had two great passions. One was basketball. When she was a toddler, she learned to dribble. She later played for hours with a Nerf ball and a small hoop nailed to a door, battling her older brother and her father, who played on his knees. When she was older, the games moved to the driveway, where there was a hoop mounted to the deck. Her parents installed floodlights so that games could go into the night. From the age of ten, she took hundreds of shots a day. “Playing basketball for me is like breathing,” she said.

Her other passion was her faith. Every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night, the family attended services at an evangelical church. When Hammon was seven, the church showed a movie based on the Rapture, called “A Thief in the Night.” She thought of being separated from her family, and she was terrified. Soon after, she went to the front of the church and declared that she had accepted Christ into her heart.

Becky’s mother was convinced that she would become a minister or a missionary. Becky wanted to play in the N.B.A. Her father had to tell her, gently, that it wouldn’t happen—but she might aim for a college scholarship. Even that seemed unlikely. Hammon was under five feet until around eighth grade, and a growth spurt sputtered out at five feet six. “I’ll never be able to compete athletically,” she remembers realizing, “so I have to learn how to beat people with my mind.”

She told me that Christianity gave her “courage and comfort,” a sense that there was a purpose to her life. “You can’t separate the two,” she said, of her faith and basketball, as we sat in the kitchen of the Spurs’ training facility, in San Antonio. “It would be like trying to strain my white blood cells from my red blood cells. It would be like trying to separate my personality from my soul.”

At Stevens High School in Rapid City, Hammon became the school’s all-time leader in scoring, assists, and steals, and she was voted South Dakota’s Player of the Year. There was no clear road from Rapid City to a top college program, but, after Hammon’s junior year, she got a break. She was invited to an élite training camp in Terre Haute, Indiana. Soon, it was clear to everyone there that the diminutive guard with the long ponytail could shoot.

One of the people watching was an assistant coach at Colorado State, who reported back to the head coach, Greg Williams. Williams went to Rapid City to watch Hammon play; he then offered her a full scholarship. “Though she was not arrogant, she believed in herself,” he told me. In 1995, when Hammon started her freshman year at Colorado State, the team had rarely finished a season with a winning record. During her senior year, the team finished 33–3 and made the Sweet Sixteen in the N.C.A.A. tournament. “Nothing bothered her,” Williams said. “Becky always wanted to take the tough shot.” She became the school’s all-time leader in points, assists, and threes, and the leading scorer, male or female, in Western Athletic Conference history.

When Hammon graduated, the W.N.B.A. was in its third season. It was not the first women’s professional basketball league, but it was the starriest, with N.C.A.A. and Olympic legends like Lisa Leslie, Rebecca Lobo, and Sheryl Swoopes, and it had the full backing of the N.B.A. On the W.N.B.A.’s draft day, Hammon was in Fort Collins, waiting for her agent to call; the phone didn’t ring. There had been an influx of established players as a rival league folded, but the real problem was that Hammon was considered too small to compete. Though she wasn’t drafted, the New York Liberty offered her a spot at its training camp, where not every player would make the team. She survived the cuts and signed a contract for twenty-five thousand dollars.

The Liberty had some of the best players in the league, like Teresa Weatherspoon, an energetic ball handler, and Vickie Johnson, a silky-smooth scorer. Hammon challenged herself to match up against them in practice. Before long, she had made herself indispensable as a substitute player, coming off the bench to score and to guide the team. In 2003, she became the starting point guard. “Her size never mattered,” the Liberty’s head coach, Richie Adubato, said. “When she drove to the basket, it didn’t matter who was in there. She had one shot blocked, I think, in four years.”

In 2007, the San Antonio Silver Stars traded for her. Dan Hughes, the coach, would watch her take on multiple opponents and think, She’s in trouble—we’re in trouble. Then he came to appreciate how “she’d hang in the air longer, create spin, and hit the corner on the backboard,” and he began looking forward to seeing how she got out of such situations. “I became a fan,” he said.

Hammon became one of the most popular players in the W.N.B.A., but the league struggled financially. Since its promising first years, many teams have lost money; several have been moved or shuttered. In the W.N.B.A., players’ annual salaries max out at just over a hundred thousand dollars; in the N.B.A., the minimum is more than five hundred thousand, and stars make tens of millions, never mind endorsement money. W.N.B.A. players routinely spend about half the year overseas, where private patrons or wealthy corporations back teams as vanity projects. In 2007, Hammon was making about ninety-five thousand dollars a year, then the W.N.B.A.’s maximum salary, when C.S.K.A., a Russian team, offered her a four-year deal worth around two million dollars. As part of the deal, Hammon would become a Russian citizen; the rules of the Russian Premier League prevent teams from fielding more than two American players.

While Hammon was negotiating her contract with C.S.K.A., she learned that the U.S. Olympic team had not invited her to its first round of tryouts. The exclusion reinforced the idea she had about herself. “I’ve always been on the outside looking in,” she said. “The kid not picked.” The Russian national team asked her to play for them, and she accepted the offer. She wanted to play in the Olympics, and Washington’s political relations with Moscow were not nearly as fraught as they are now. “This is basketball, it isn’t the Cold War,” she said at the time.

She moved to Moscow for the C.S.K.A. season in 2007, and began training with the national team in 2008. She spent seven months a year abroad for the next six years, until she started working with the Spurs. “I was an outsider,” Hammon told me. “They looked at me with one eyebrow”—she cocked hers. Anna Petrakova, who played with Hammon on C.S.K.A. and the national team, told me, “When people come to Russia, they always seem a little standoffish. They don’t always integrate in the culture.” Hammon was different. “She just came with an open heart.” Hammon learned a little Russian, and at games she enthusiastically fumbled her way through the national anthem.

Many people thought that Hammon was naïve, or worse. Some American players called her disloyal. Far more painful for Hammon was the reaction at home, in South Dakota. “I come from a red state, where it’s God, country, family,” she told me. “I got my mom calling me on the phone saying, ‘You don’t understand people of my generation,’ ” and crying every time they spoke. Before that, she’d been the spirited point guard, the All-Star everyone loved. Now everyone was questioning her. “I took a beating,” she said.

At the Summer Games in Beijing, in August, 2008, the U.S. beat Russia in the semifinals. After the game, Lisa Leslie, one of the most decorated Olympic basketball players, refused to shake Hammon’s hand. The U.S. went on to win the finals. At the medal ceremony, Hammon stood on the lowest step of the podium, in her Russian uniform, a bronze medal around her neck. When the American national anthem played, she placed her hand on her heart. Still, she was proud of the Russian national team, and of her ability to integrate with the players. Hammon told me, “I’m Russian to them, and it has nothing to do with the passport I’m holding.

“I think that journey helped prepare me to do things that people hadn’t done,” she said. “It helped me take a lot of crap. It helped build something inside me.”

When Hammon began observing Spurs practices, she assumed that it would help her get a job with a college team or in the W.N.B.A. “Coaching women, that’s where my mind-set was the whole time,” she said. Then, one night at dinner, Tony Parker, the Spurs’ point guard, who is a close friend of Hammon—“She’s sort of like my big sister,” he told me—said that he thought Popovich might hire her. “Really?” she replied.

“It was almost like a perfect match, because Pop likes to try stuff,” Parker recalled. “I thought it would be perfect for those two to get together—great basketball minds.” He had no doubt that she would be accepted by the other players. “She had the support of the point guard, so she’s good,” he added with a smile.

Popovich and Buford, the Spurs’ general manager, watched how she behaved in meetings and interacted with players on the floor. Tim Duncan, one of the game’s greatest power forwards, is known to be exceptionally reticent. Parker once said that, during his first season, Duncan didn’t even speak to him. Hammon realized that she would have to break through with Duncan over time, and off the court. “Let’s be real,” she said, and laughed. “I was not sitting there trying to give Timmy extra tips.”

“With a new job, when you go, you shut up,” Popovich said. “You don’t try to prove to people how smart you are, or that you have better ideas. She was cognizant of that sort of managerial thing.” In August, 2014, the Spurs offered Hammon the job as an assistant coach.

The announcement was greeted with fanfare. President Obama tweeted his congratulations. The mainstream media ran complimentary coverage. “No one is going to come up and say, ‘I’m so pissed you got that job, I can’t believe it,’ ” Hammon said. “There’s certain noise that I know goes on, but no one ever says it, because it’s not the politically correct thing to say.” Players and opposing coaches were, for the most part, encouraging. Stars like LeBron James and Chris Paul told her that they were happy she was hired. Last week, James told reporters, “You guys know how fond I am of Coach Pop, so for him to bring Becky in there, to be able to be an assistant and give her input—I don’t quite know how much input she has, I’m not there on a day-to-day basis—but just having her face there, it means a lot.”

Jeff Van Gundy, the former coach of the New York Knicks and the Houston Rockets and a commentator on ESPN, told me, “I’m not the social conscience of the N.B.A. I’m also not the most enlightened. Twenty years ago, I would have laughed at the notion of a female assistant or head coach. But I think we are becoming a more enlightened league. I think coaches are. But you know who doesn’t get enough credit? Players. I think they have really made incredible progress.”

Most of the criticism came from the noisiest and nastiest corners of talk radio and social media. At Hammon’s first press conference after her hiring, a reporter read her an anonymous e-mail that called it a publicity stunt, and suggested that the only thing the players had to learn from her was advice on baking cookies. “People are, like, ‘What do you say to that?’ ” Hammon said. “At the end of the day, you have to say, ‘So what’s the truth in that? Is that true? No, it’s not.’ So I have no comment to that—other than, I make good chocolate-chip cookies. That’s a fact.”

This has not been an easy year for the Spurs. The team’s longtime stars are aging or retired, and its M.V.P. candidate, Kawhi Leonard, has been out with a quadriceps injury for all but nine games. Still, throughout the regular season, the Spurs remained on track to make the playoffs for the twenty-first straight time. Since Popovich became coach, in 1996, they have won five championships, and from 2000 to 2017 they had eighteen consecutive fifty-win seasons—a stretch of excellence that is nearly unparalleled in sports. There are plenty of factors that explain their success: a keen eye for talent abroad, a famed analytics department, and the good fortune of drafting Duncan. But there is something more: the team ethos—selfless play above all—instilled by Popovich and known around San Antonio as “the Spurs way.”

Because of their success, the Spurs have not been eligible for the highest picks in the draft. Instead of relying on college superstars, they have built their team through some crafty trades and by pushing their young players to the limit. They scout top international players—like Parker, from France, and Manu Ginóbili, from Argentina—and sign N.B.A. veterans like Pau Gasol, from Spain, who is thirty-seven but can anchor a defense and move in a way that creates space on the floor; they also, as in the case of Leonard, hone the raw athletic talent of less experienced players. When the Spurs are at their best, the ball moves fluidly and freely. Duncan, who retired in 2016 and was perhaps the least flashy major star in the N.B.A., was emblematic of the team’s unselfish style. On a given night, almost anyone on the roster can be the leading scorer.

Popovich rejects the idea of winning at all costs. “We want to win the right way, we want to lose the right way,” he told me. At the team’s first film session after losing to the Miami Heat in the N.B.A. Finals in 2013, Popovich reviewed the team’s mistakes and then said, “Gentlemen, if this is the worst thing that ever happens to you in your life, your life is going to be a breeze.” During games, he’ll call a quick time-out to shout at a player, or bench someone for playing badly. But off the court he does not talk about staying focussed or decry “distractions.” To the contrary, he tends to talk politics with his players, his coaches, and reporters. He once brought in John Carlos, the sprinter who gave a Black Power salute from the Olympic podium, to speak to the team. Two days before the 2014 N.B.A. Finals, when the team gathered in the video room, he displayed a photograph of Eddie Mabo, an Australian indigenous-land-rights activist. A few weeks ago, the Spurs travelled to D.C. to play the Washington Wizards, in a game that had implications for the playoffs. While they were in town, Popovich took them to visit the Supreme Court.

“Everybody talks about everything ad nauseam,” Popovich told me. “I’m sure the coaches are, like, ‘Oh, my God, can’t we just play basketball?’ I think it’s a huge part of what we do, because it helps them love each other, it helps them feel responsible to each other, it helps them want to work for and with each other—and it helps them understand that when they’re thirty-two or thirty-five or thirty-seven their life starts all over again, and it’s probably not going to have anything to do with basketball. They need to know what they’re walking into, and what kind of social system we have, and what kind of world we live in, because they’re going to be raising kids by then, too. And it’s important to have your self-image be much more, and hopefully have basketball be a small part of who they are when they’re done with this.”

Popovich’s rules include: don’t skip steps, have a sense of humor, and get over yourself. These rules are another way of reaching the equilibrium between humility and self-confidence which Hammon first found through faith. Popovich said, “She knows what she knows and she knows what she doesn’t, and, what she doesn’t know, she gets her ass in the film room, or nails down one of the other coaches.” He added, “I think she’s a star.”

When Becky Hammon played basketball, she was known as a shooter, but she loved passing. It was her way of dictating the game while getting others involved. Now she charts the Spurs’ passes in order to see which ones lead to scoring. It isn’t her primary responsibility—like other assistants, she is responsible for scouting and for helping to game-plan for a list of opposing teams—but it calls on her experience as a point guard.

At first, the aim was to get a picture of the pace of the game: Hammon would note each time the team pushed the ball down the court. Then the project evolved. How many times did they kick it out of the post? How often did wheeling it around the perimeter lead to an open shot? These days, all the top teams emphasize passing. But, with Leonard out, it has been especially important for the Spurs. So the coaches focus on reading defenses and baiting opposing players, trying to set up an open shot. They have heated debates about spacing on the court.

Popovich and Buford told me that Hammon is an effective coach because of her “basketball I.Q.” But she is also adept at the human elements of the game. When she started working with the Spurs, she noticed how Duncan communicated with his teammates nonverbally. “His leadership—if you go back, you see Tim is touching people all the time,” she said. She talked about the impact of Ginóbili, who is forty: “Even if Manu never steps onto the court this year, the way he understands culture and brings people together—it’s always about the team.” This year, the Spurs have been tested by Leonard’s absence and by tensions over when and whether he might return. But part of a coach’s job is to deal with the unexpected, and to fix relationships when they break down. Lately, the team has been carried by thirty-two-year-old LaMarcus Aldridge. By the end of last season, Aldridge was so frustrated that he asked for a trade. Instead, he and Popovich talked through their differences. “Maybe what worked for Tim Duncan wasn’t working for LaMarcus,” Hammon said.

Hammon fits in with the Spurs’ coöperative mentality. “She’s committed, she’s passionate, she’s smart, she’s worldly,” Ginóbili said. Some of her reputation comes from her accomplishments as a player. The W.N.B.A. has had trouble getting traction with N.B.A. fans, but many N.B.A. players follow the league with respect. Jonathon Simmons, who left the Spurs last year, for the Orlando Magic, said in 2015 that Hammon is a “players’ coach.” He told me that he meant it literally: “She once was a player, so she understands, she relates.”

Of course, players talking to a female reporter about the first female coach are unlikely to offer skepticism, and it is easy to find examples of sexism and even alleged sexual violence within the N.B.A. In October, 2016, the former Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose, now with the Minnesota Timberwolves, was tried and cleared in a rape case. Rose testified that, at a 2008 N.B.A. rookie-orientation program, he was told not to leave behind used condoms, reportedly saying, “You never know what women are up to nowadays.” (A spokesperson for the N.B.A. said that players were instructed on how to dispose of condoms, but not because of concerns about exploitation by women.) In February, more than a dozen current and former Dallas Mavericks employees told Sports Illustrated that it was an “open secret” that the team’s former president sexually harassed employees and that the management tolerated sexual harassment and domestic violence. (The former president has denied the allegations.) In response to the article, the Mavericks announced that they had suspended one employee, terminated another, and hired outside counsel to investigate the allegations.

When I asked Hammon about the Mavericks allegations, she said, “The culture of sports has been ‘He’s acting like a boy.’ What does that mean? You’re acting like an animal? There needs to be boundaries. There needs to be an environment where everyone can succeed.”

Some people talk about Hammon’s career as though it were a quick fix for sexism in the N.B.A. Instead of calling for more women to be hired, they focus on the advancement of this particular woman. It’s a little like assuming that Barack Obama’s Presidency would end American racism. In fact, Hammon’s success has not yet led to many more coaching opportunities for women. In 2015, the Sacramento Kings hired Nancy Lieberman, a former head coach in the W.N.B.A. and in the N.B.A.’s development league, as a full-time assistant. (She was recently named a head coach in Ice Cube’s Big3 league, featuring retired N.B.A. players.) Last October, the Kings also hired Jenny Boucek, another former W.N.B.A. head coach, as an assistant. But no other franchises have followed suit. “When ten other teams have a Becky Hammon, that will tell me the culture is changing,” Popovich said.

The big question for Hammon, Popovich told me, is “Is this going to end up being something? Is she going to be able to matriculate and get into a head-coaching position?” Hammon is still early in her career, and it could take some time. “Some people are in the league fifteen, twenty years before they get into a head-coaching position, if they do at all,” Popovich said. “I tell her, very straightforwardly, I don’t know. Because I look at our country, and I have all kinds of doubts about all kinds of things, let alone whether she’s going to be a head coach.” Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Golden State Warriors, said last week, about the possibility of a female head coach, “I don’t know if it’s going to happen soon. Becky Hammon would be the one you’d say right away who could possibly get an interview.”

In 2015, Hammon served as the Spurs’ head coach in the N.B.A.’s summer league, in Las Vegas, and won the championship. It was not a rare accomplishment for an assistant coach, but it was a significant one. Afterward, a former N.B.A. executive indicated in a tweet that if he were a general manager he would want to hire Hammon as head coach. Jeff Van Gundy told me, “I called him up and said, ‘Bullshit you would. Because you don’t know her, and that would be your one shot. I would like to think you would, but no way.’ I think it’s going to take someone like Pop—who’s entrenched, who has great job security—to pull that trigger. You’re not going to see someone who has his job on the line. Is that fair? No. Is that reality for Becky? Yeah.”

For Hammon to be hired as a head coach, Popovich said, “it’s going to take somebody who has some guts, some imagination, and is not driven by old standards and old forms.” He went on, “If somebody is smart, it’s actually a pretty good marketing deal—but it’s not about that. It’s got to be that she’s competent, that she’s ready.”

Last spring, Hammon turned down an offer to become the head coach of the women’s basketball team at the University of Florida, after considering it seriously. She was also invited to interview for the Milwaukee Bucks’ general-manager position—an unusual occurrence for an assistant coach who has been on the job only three years. Hammon said that, when she asked why she was being considered, she was told that “ownership had asked them to reach out.” (The Bucks declined to comment.) More recently, she interviewed to be the head coach of the men’s team at Colorado State, before withdrawing her name from contention.

When I asked Hammon why she turned down the University of Florida job, she said that Popovich and the Spurs had more to teach her. “If you’re interested in cars, it’s like Henry Ford coming and saying, Hey, why don’t I teach you about the Model T?”

Her goal is not to save the sport from itself, or to prove that women can thrive in male-dominated professions. She doesn’t have time to worry about taking on doubters. “My motives shouldn’t be to change people’s minds,” she said. “My job is to be the best that I can be, and if that changes your mind then great, but I can’t be consumed with how you feel about me.” ♦