Popovich says he and Duncan are soulmates

Gregg Popovich hopes he'll be able to keep it together when Tim Duncan has his jersey retired by the San Antonio Spurs on Sunday night, but he knows he'll swell with pride when the player he coached for 19 years is honored by the franchise the two of them conspired to make legendary.

"I love him dearly," Popovich told ESPN's Marc Stein in an interview earlier this week. Popovich also described Duncan as being "like my son," and explained how his paternal instincts took over at points, particularly as he watched Duncan slow down in the twilight of his career.

"It would frustrate him if some young whippersnapper would make a move on him or do something and look at him like, 'Yeah, I got you,'" Popovich said. "I wanted to run on the court (and say): 'No, no, no. That wasn't Tim Duncan that you just did that to.'"

But the father-son dynamic doesn't quite do justice to the relationship the two have built over the years. Popovich considers Duncan something more akin to a soulmate.

"We're more soulmates in life than we are in basketball," he said. "I've been on his fanny so many times throughout his 19 years and half the time he agrees with me and half the time he thinks I'm a nut. And he just is polite enough and mature enough to just ignore me and go back out on the court, which allowed me to coach everybody else all those years. But off the court, that's where we're soulmates."

As one might expect, Popovich has been a bit lonely this season as he's had to do his job without Duncan around for the first time in two decades.

"I miss him on the plane and on the bus trips, and in the locker room after a win or a loss. Just the banter back and forth that we've had for, whatever, 19 or 20 years. I miss all of that."

Though he's ostensibly retired, Duncan is still very much part of the Spurs community. He's participated in training camp, shown up at practices, and worked one-on-one with Paul Gasol. The Spurs expect him to officially rejoin the organization in some capacity, and though the coaching staff never knows exactly when he'll drop in, they keep a locker for him for whenever he does.

"We never know, honestly. It's totally random," Popovich said of Duncan's appearances. "Everything is extemporaneous. He's there or he's not. We might walk through the building and all of a sudden he's in there lifting weights. We put a locker for him in the coach's locker room in the practice facility and at the AT&T Center so he comes whenever he feels like it."