- published: 09 Jan 2009
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J.A. Adande (/əˈdɑːndeɪ/; born October 25, 1970 in Los Angeles, California) is an American sports columnist who covers the National Basketball Association for ESPN.com. He also serves as a panelist for ESPN's Around the Horn and as a guest host on ESPN's Pardon the Interruption television shows. Adande is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, and also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Journalism, where he teaches a class entitled "Sports Commentary," and co-teaches a class entitled "Sports Public Relations."
Adande joined ESPN.com as an NBA columnist in August 2007. The panel at Around the Horn all congratulated him on the job and played a joke "Buy or Sell" segment about Adande's comments about joining ESPN. He is also now an NBA analyst on SportsCenter.
He was born in Los Angeles, the son of Desire and Elizabeth (Oberstein) Adande. His grandfather, Gerson "Gus" Oberstein (1914-2003), was a violinist who had played with jazzmen Joe Roland and Charlie Parker, and later with the Berkeley Symphony.
Gregg Charles Popovich (born January 28, 1949) is an American basketball coach who is currently the head coach of the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Taking over as coach of the Spurs in 1996, Popovich is the longest tenured active coach in both the NBA and all US major sports leagues. He is often referred to as "Coach Pop" or simply "Pop".
Popovich holds the record for most consecutive winning regular seasons in NBA history at 18, and third all time for the regular season, behind Pat Riley with 19, and Phil Jackson with 20. He has won five NBA championships as the head coach of the Spurs, a feat achieved only by four other coaches in NBA history (Phil Jackson, Red Auerbach, Pat Riley, and John Kundla). He is also one of 9 coaches in NBA history to have won 1,000 NBA games. Achievements such as these are what garnered him recognition as one of the greatest basketball head coaches of all time.
Popovich was born in East Chicago, Indiana on January 28, 1949, to a Serbian father and Croatian mother. He started his basketball career playing Biddy Basketball and was on the 1960 Gary Biddy Basketball All-Star Team which finished third in the World Tournament, held at Gary's Memorial Auditorium. He attended Merrillville High School and graduated in 1970 from the United States Air Force Academy. He played basketball for four seasons at the Academy and in his senior year was the team captain and the leading scorer. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Soviet Studies, and he underwent Air Force intelligence gathering and processing training. At one point, Popovich considered a career with the Central Intelligence Agency.