Mitch Johnson Says the Spurs Were Not Ready for the NBA Finals and That Is a Damning Admission
San Antonio coach Mitch Johnson did not sugarcoat the Spurs’ NBA Finals loss. He told everyone exactly what he thought.
“We weren’t ready,” Johnson said after Saturday’s Game 5 defeat. He spelled it out further. The team had not figured out the moment. The team had not adjusted to the physicality. The team had not done the small things that win championship rounds. That is the kind of honesty a lot of coaches in his position would never offer publicly.
The honesty is the problem. Coaches do not typically tell their roster they were not ready unless they want a fire under the players for next season. Johnson is doing exactly that, and the reaction inside the Spurs organization is going to be interesting.
Look at the evidence and Johnson is right. The Spurs lost the Finals 4-1, and the only game they won was Game 3 when Wembanyama played his only fully dominant outing of the series. They lost two games in the final seconds because of late-game execution mistakes. De’Aaron Fox’s drive into OG Anunoby in Game 4 became the play of the series. Stephon Castle struggled with foul trouble. Wembanyama could not hold his ground against Karl-Anthony Towns and Mitchell Robinson.
Every one of those issues comes back to preparation. Late-game execution is a coaching tell. Physical readiness is a coaching tell. Getting outhustled by an older team is a coaching tell.
Johnson is in his first full year as the Spurs head coach. He inherited a young roster from Gregg Popovich and was thrown into a Finals run a season earlier than anyone expected. The team won 58 games in the regular season. They beat the Thunder, the Nuggets, and the Lakers to get to the championship round. They had every reason to feel like they belonged.
Then the Knicks showed up and exposed the gaps. Mitch Johnson is saying the Spurs themselves did not see those gaps until it was too late, which is a softer way of saying he, too, was caught off guard.
The good news for San Antonio is that the gaps are fixable. Wembanyama is going to spend the summer adding strength. Castle is going to keep developing. Dylan Harper just emerged as a star in the Finals and is going to demand a bigger role. Fox is going to be in the offseason conversation as a player San Antonio either has to trust more or move on from.
The bad news is that the Finals window is going to be brutal next year. The Knicks are not going anywhere. Oklahoma City is built for the long haul. Boston is going to make a major Giannis move. Denver is still the Denver of Nikola Jokic. Memphis might trade Ja Morant to a contender. The Western Conference is about to get even harder.
For the Spurs to take the next step, Johnson has to use this summer to fix what he just publicly admitted was broken. The good thing about getting it out in the open is that nobody on the roster can pretend they did not hear it.
Mitch Johnson took accountability and put it on the wall. Now the Spurs have to earn the next Finals trip with the work.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
