I’ve watched a lot of bad coaching performances over the years.
I’ve watched coaches refuse to make adjustments. I’ve watched coaches leave cold players on the floor too long. I’ve watched coaches get completely outclassed by their counterparts in playoff series.
I don’t think I’ve ever watched a coach repeatedly coach his own team out of games the way Mitch Johnson just did in the NBA Finals.
The San Antonio Spurs didn’t lose because they lacked talent.
They didn’t lose because the Knicks were some unbeatable juggernaut.
They didn’t lose because of injuries.
They lost because their head coach spent five games making the same mistakes over and over again, while somehow finding new ones along the way.
The most damning part of this series isn’t one specific moment. It’s the pattern.
Every game except Game 4 followed the exact same script.
The Spurs would come flying out of the gates, build a double-digit lead, and look like the clearly superior team. Then the second quarter would arrive.
Like clockwork, the Knicks would blitz San Antonio to start the quarter, the lead would shrink, momentum would completely flip, and Johnson would seemingly have no answer.
Once is a bad quarter.
Twice is concerning.
Four times in five games is coaching malpractice.
At some point it stops being a coincidence and starts becoming a reflection of the guy standing on the sidelines.
Championship coaches recognize patterns and make adjustments.
Mitch Johnson apparently enjoyed watching the same movie over and over again.
The frustrating part is these weren’t complicated basketball problems.
These weren’t some advanced chess-match adjustments only basketball purists could identify.
Fans on their couches could see it happening.
The television announcers could see it happening.
Everybody watching could see it happening.
Everybody except the guy being paid to stop it.
Another issue that became impossible to ignore was Johnson’s complete lack of consistency with his rotation.
Take Harrison Barnes.
Is Barnes the player he was during his prime years with Golden State?
Of course not.
Nobody is arguing that.
But Barnes is one of the few players on the roster with significant NBA Finals experience. He was a crucial minutes eater throughout the regular season and played in all seven games of San Antonio’s Western Conference Finals victory over Oklahoma City.
Then the Finals arrived and he might as well have been placed in witness protection.
Again, I’m not sitting here arguing Harrison Barnes was the difference between winning and losing a championship.
I’m not even saying he should’ve been playing 35 minutes a night.
What I am saying is that when your team repeatedly blows leads, repeatedly loses composure, repeatedly struggles with game management, and repeatedly looks like it lacks a veteran calming presence, it’s fair to question why one of your most experienced players suddenly became an afterthought.
At the very least, Barnes could’ve gone out there and bricked open threes like everyone else.
More importantly, he could’ve provided something this Spurs team desperately lacked throughout the series: experience.
Instead, Johnson’s rotations felt random from game to game.
One night a player was trusted.
The next night he wasn’t.
One night the Spurs would find something that worked.
The next night it disappeared.
Championship teams thrive on consistency.
The Spurs got anything but.
As bad as those repeated second-quarter collapses were, Johnson somehow saved his biggest mistake for the biggest moment of the series.
With six seconds remaining in Game 4, the Knicks trailed by one and were inbounding from half court.
Johnson made the baffling decision not to put a defender on OG Anunoby, the inbounder.
Read that sentence again.
An NBA Finals game.
Six seconds left.
One-point game.
And the inbounder isn’t defended.
The decision dragged Victor Wembanyama and De’Aaron Fox nearly 35 feet away from the basket. Wembanyama was forced to contest on the perimeter while Fox spent most of the possession watching the play develop.
The Knicks missed the initial three-point attempt.
Problem solved, right?
Not quite.
Because the player who wasn’t defended on the inbound was free to crash the glass, grab the offensive rebound, and score the putback that gave New York the lead with just over a second remaining.
You couldn’t draw up a more disastrous result if you tried.
The player who should’ve been accounted for from the start ended up scoring the biggest basket of the series.
That single sequence may have swung the entire championship.
To be fair, Mitch Johnson wasn’t the only reason the Spurs lost this series.
De’Aaron Fox deserves plenty of criticism as well.
When San Antonio traded for Fox, the expectation wasn’t that he’d be the best player on the floor. That’s Wembanyama’s job.
The expectation was that he’d be the veteran star who settled things down when everything started going sideways.
Instead, Fox was largely a disaster.
His late-game decision making was questionable, his shot selection was inconsistent, and too often he looked more like a passenger than a co-pilot.
When the Spurs needed a veteran presence most, they got very little from the guy they brought in specifically for moments like these.
After the Spurs regained possession with a one-point lead and nine seconds remaining in Game 4, Fox attacked the basket for a contested layup instead of pulling the ball out.
The correct play was obvious.
Force the Knicks to foul.
Take more time off the clock.
Walk to the free throw line where Fox shoots over 75%.
Instead, he rushed a shot, left time on the clock, and gave New York another opportunity.
It was a poor decision.
But great coaches are supposed to help eliminate those mistakes.
That’s part of the job description.
That being said, Fox may have been bad, but Mitch Johnson was the true GOAT of this series.
And not the good kind of GOAT.
Fox made mistakes.
Johnson built an entire Finals résumé out of them.
Then came Game 5.
And somehow Mitch Johnson topped himself.
After watching yet another 15-plus point lead disappear, the Spurs found themselves trailing late.
The Knicks led by one with just over 25 seconds remaining and were shooting two free throws.
They made the first.
They missed the second.
Then New York grabbed the offensive rebound.
At that point there was still plenty of time.
All San Antonio needed was one defensive stop.
One.
The shot clock had reset to 14 seconds because there was no change of possession.
Every NBA coach knows this.
Every NBA assistant coach knows this.
Most NBA fans know this.
Apparently Mitch Johnson didn’t.
Instead of trusting his defense and understanding the situation, Johnson began screaming for his players to foul.
The Knicks happily accepted the gift.
Back to the free throw line.
Two-possession game.
Season over.
Had the Spurs simply played defense and gotten one stop, they likely would’ve regained possession down just two points with eight or nine seconds remaining and a chance to tie or win the game.
Instead, their coach voluntarily ended their season for them.
What makes this all so painful for Spurs fans is that this wasn’t some overmatched underdog.
This wasn’t a team happy just to be there.
This was a legitimate championship team.
A team featuring Victor Wembanyama and De’Aaron Fox.
A team that repeatedly proved it could build double-digit leads against New York.
A team that had one hand on the Larry O’Brien Trophy multiple times throughout the series.
And yet every time the pressure rose, the mistakes followed.
The blown leads.
The lack of adjustments.
The disastrous end-game management.
The situational awareness of a coach who looked completely overwhelmed by the moment.
Was De’Aaron Fox terrible in this series?
Absolutely.
Did the role players disappear at key moments?
Without question.
Did the Knicks make the plays necessary to win a championship?
They certainly did.
But one statistic keeps sticking in my head.
The Spurs led for 72% of the minutes played in the NBA Finals.
Seventy-two percent.
And they won one game.
One.
I’m not saying the Spurs were the better team, but if you lead for nearly three quarters of an entire Finals series and walk away with a single victory, somebody has to answer for it.
The players deserve blame.
Fox deserves blame.
But when a team repeatedly builds leads, repeatedly loses those leads, repeatedly makes the same mistakes, repeatedly looks confused in late-game situations, and repeatedly gets out-executed in critical moments, eventually the finger has to point toward the guy holding the clipboard.
The Knicks won the championship.
Mitch Johnson coached like he was trying to win it for them.
