Andrew Lawrence

The coach is stepping away from a role in which he won five championships with the Spurs. He will be hard to replace, on and off the court

Raise a glass to Gregg Popovich, the gruff teddy bear who lifted the San Antonio Spurs into the NBA’s elite. After three decades on the Spurs’ sideline, he is stepping back from coaching to become the team’s president of basketball operations. It’s a back-to-the-future move for the 76-year-old: he was the Spurs’ general manager for eight years before he became the team’s coach. (“I’m no longer the coach, I’m El Jefe,” Popovich jokingly declared this week before unveiling a T-shirt with that Spanish title.) Altogether, Pop won five NBA championships from 1999 through 2014, a run that puts him among the greatest coaches in league history. But when it came to being the NBA’s unflinching statesman, he was in a league all by himself.

Ryan Coogler’s smash hit horror focuses on the opening of a juke joint, a one-time mainstay in Black southern culture

In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the Smokestack twins – a gangster pair played by Michael B Jordan – return to their Mississippi Delta home town to open a juke joint and make a fast buck, only to wind up hunkered inside when danger literally comes knocking. But the juke joint is more than a safe space from vampires; for Black people during segregation, it was an escape from the horrors of the so-called “separate-but-equal” US economy. “The juke joint represents, as the film suggests, this multifaceted connection to the foundation of Black experience,” says William Ferris, a University of North Carolina history professor who has made documenting blues music and southern culture his life’s work. “It’s a safe haven from racial violence.”

The coach has gone from the football field to the gossip pages with his May to December relationship. It’s an extraordinary turnaround in his career

Football has never known a control freak like Bill Belichick, the Nixonian figure who ran the New England Patriots as if their facility was a CIA black site. But four months into Belichick’s new coaching tenure, at the University of North Carolina, there is a stunning lack of clarity about who’s actually in charge.

Mercedes-Benz stadium, Atlanta

The record-breaking Grand National tour brings together two stylistically opposed stars and continues an internet-breaking feud

Just when it seemed as if Kendrick Lamar had dropped his grudge against Drake, it turns out his “game over” coda to the Super Bowl half-time show was just the end of regulation. On the Grand National tour, a four-month stadium circuit for the Grammy-sweeping album GNX and SZA’s reissue album Lana, Lamar takes the music industry’s most bitter rivalry match into overtime.