When the news came down in the second week of December 1996 that Bob Hill, the loquacious, funny, impeccably dressed coach of the San Antonio Spurs, had been fired by the team’s general manager, who’d then installed himself as the team’s new coach, the reaction of much of the NBA community outside of Texas — of which I was a part — was, really, pretty uniform: “Who the (bleep) is Gregg Popovich?”