Yesterday, u/MiloIsCute posted about this so I figured I'd dig into some of the circumstances surrounding the firing of Bob Hill.
TL;DR - In December of 1996, Spurs' GM, Gregg Popovich, fired Bob Hill after going 121-43 over his first two seasons as HC. Fans were mad.
Here's a newspaper clipping from a San Antonio newspaper on Dec. 12, 1996
Before the 94-95 NBA season, the Spurs and their new owner, Peter Holt, hired Gregg Popovich as their General Manager. Together, Popovich and Holt hired Bob Hill, former Head Coach of the Knicks and Pacers, as the new coach of the San Antonio Spurs. Bob Hill had been largely unsuccessful during short stints in New York and Indiana, but got off to a quick start in San Antonio. In Hill's first season as Head Coach of the Spurs, they finished with a record of 62-20; good for 1st in the Midwest Division. But they would ultimately lose to the eventual NBA Champion, Houston Rockets, in 6 games. The following season (95-96), the Bob Hill coached team would finish 59-23, again winning the Midwest Division. However, after 6 games in the Western Conference Finals, the Spurs were defeated by Stockton and Malone's Utah Jazz.
After a 3-15 start to the 96-97 season, Gregg Popovich fired Bob Hill and appointed himself as Head Coach of the Spurs. Gregg Popovich cited Bob Hill's supposed 'loss of the locker room' as his reason for firing him, but Hill adamantly denied those allegations. In fact, Spurs' star David Robinson had yet to play a game that season due to a lingering injury. And despite the Spurs' solid roster, they had no one to carry the load, offensively or defensively, when The Admiral wasn't on the court. The 3-15 start to the season was almost justifiable when looking at their roster without Robinson. When questioned by the media about the Spurs' poor start, Bob Hill cited a "lack of manpower".
Although David Robinson would only play in 6 games in the 96-97 season, Bob Hill's words continuously rang true as the Popovich lead Spurs finished with a dismal 20-62 record; going just 17-47 under Gregg Popovich. Looking back on Pop's career in San Antonio, we cannot fault him for his decision in December of 1996, but we can question his reasoning. Did Pop think the 96-97 Spurs had a real shot of turning around their season or was he just waiting for a reason to fire Bob Hill and take over his duties?
The evening of February 24th, 1976 was like any other for Michelle Mitchell. The 19 year-old University of Nevada nursing student had spent the day in class, and as the sun dipped below the horizon, she was running a habitual errand—dropping a container of orange juice off to her father at a nearby bowling alley—before heading home.
Just past 6 PM, Michelle was driving her Volkswagen Beetle east on 9th street, on the southern end of campus, when, as she passed Evans avenue, her engine seized and shut down, causing her car to roll impotently through the intersection. She used the car's accrued momentum to coast to the side of the road, and with the help of a passerby, pushed it into a nearby parking lot. Michelle then crossed the street to the university campus, walked into a phone booth, and called her mother, Barbara, to ask for a ride home.
When Barbara Mitchell arrived half an hour later, however, Michelle was nowhere to be seen. Barbara performed a cursory search of the area and found Michelle's Beetle, sitting in the parking lot Michelle had described, but couldn't find Michelle. With rising anxiety, she hurried back to the phone booth and called her husband and the police.
Barbara, her husband Edwin, and the police together spent hours combing over the entire campus and its surrounding neighborhoods searching for Michelle, but to no avail. The police brought a sniffer dog along, but an attempt to have it follow Michelle's scent from the phone booth led nowhere. As night officially set in, the police began to transition Michelle's disappearance into a larger missing-person investigation, with another search planned in the coming week.
Later that night, an elderly couple living at 333 E 9th Street, pulled into their driveway and triggered their garage door. As they watched the door open, their car's headlights began to illuminate the garage's interior, and they saw something unexpected: a human body. The startled couple rushed inside to investigate, and found the body of a partially-clothed woman, lying prostrate in a pool of drying blood, her hands bound behind her back with twine. Police were called, and as they turned the body over, they recognized the woman immediately. It was Michelle Mitchell.
The only major wound on Michelle’s body was a deep laceration across her neck, which was the source of the drying blood. She didn’t have any defensive wounds, which meant she may have been taken by surprise by her attacker, and the state of her body
... keep reading on reddit ➡)