Why Mitch Johnson was made for his playoff moment

His junior varsity first recreation had not gone nicely. Johnson missed each shot he took in a uncommon loss for O’Dea. Afterward, Johnson tracked down the person they referred to as “Coach K” within the locker room.

“Coach, I’m sorry. I played terrible,” the child mentioned, virtually shaking. “It will never happen again.”

Recounting the story as we speak, Kalina — the O’Dea JV coach in query — views it as the primary inkling of what the child would at some point develop into.

“It showed that he cared — a lot,” Kalina mentioned. “He was a perfectionist.”

Despite the one off night time, that distraught 14-year-old was rapidly promoted to the varsity to play for legendary coach Phil Lumpkin. And as a junior and senior, he led O’Dea to back-to-back Washington state championships, then went on to a embellished school profession at Stanford.

He then discovered his approach into the skilled teaching ranks, first within the G League after which within the NBA.

And on Sunday on the Frost Bank Center, when the Spurs make their long-awaited return to the Western Conference playoffs with Game 1 of a first-round sequence in opposition to Portland, Mitch Johnson will develop into the primary coach not named Gregg Popovich to steer the franchise into an NBA postseason since 1996.

Looking again, the 39-year-old Johnson admits he by no means noticed any of this coming. How might he?

“As a player you never want to be the coach — you want to play,” Johnson mentioned. “But there are some tea leaves, looking back now, that make sense.”

Most of these tea leaves first took root in Johnson’s native Seattle.

Long earlier than Sacramento’s Doug Christie might name Johnson an NBA teaching colleague, he was a fan of his dad.

Everyone who got here of age in Seattle through the late Nineteen Seventies and early Eighties was.

John Johnson, who was higher identified all through the Emerald City as “J.J.,” spent the final five seasons of an All-Star NBA career with the Seattle SuperSonics.

In 1979, the elder Johnson was the starting small forward for a Seattle team that won its first and only NBA title before vacating the Pacific Northwest for Oklahoma City in 2008.

“As a little kid, you knew all of those guys — J.J., Dennis Johnson, Jack Sikma,” mentioned Christie, who starred at Rainier Beach High School. “If you liked basketball, you loved those guys.”

In Seattle, the Sonics were life. Christie recalls a program created in that era by the Seattle Police Department, in which officers patrolling their beats would hand out collector cards of Sonics stars to youth in high-risk areas.

The only catch was the kids had to approach the officers and introduce themselves to get the cards. The previously distrustful Christie became a cop’s best friend.

“That kind of broke it for me, because I wanted those cards,” Christie said. “I had the whole team.”

John Johnson retired from the NBA following the 1980-81 season. Nearly five years later, his son Mitchell was born. Growing up the son of a SuperSonic in Seattle had its benefits. It also occasionally came with drawbacks or so it seemed to Kalina.

At Mitch Johnson’s games at O’Dea, his father’s distinctive, booming voice could often be heard echoing throughout the gym. He would cheer his son on, sure. He would also offer well-intentioned instruction, as a retired NBA star might.

One day Kalina asked Johnson if he would like someone to talk to his dad about taking the volume down a notch.

Johnson was initially confused. Then he smiled.

“Coach K,” he said, “I stopped listening to that in the fifth grade.”

In that moment, Kalina learned something else about O’Dea’s teenage starting point guard.

“He loved and respected his father,” Kalina said. “He just knew how to block out the noise when he was on the court.”

To many of the younger Johnson’s childhood friends from Seattle, he was never called Mitch.

He was and nonetheless is “Maestro.”

That nickname was bestowed on Johnson in middle school by his father, homage to the kid’s uncanny ability to control a basketball game like a symphony.

Years later, the moniker followed Johnson to college at Stanford.

“He was our conductor,” said Los Angeles Clippers center Brook Lopez, who starred with his twin brother Robin on Stanford teams from 2006 to 2008. “He was leading us out there.”

When Johnson left for college in 2006, a bit of Seattle came with him.

His father relocated to San Jose, 25 minutes from the Stanford campus, to remain close to his son. “J.J.” was a fixture at Cardinal games, always willing to impart wisdom to players after games.

“He was around a lot,” Lopez said. “You could see where (Mitch) got it from.”

As a junior in 2007-08, Johnson enjoyed his best collegiate season. He started 35 of 36 games, led the Pac-12 in assists and helped orchestrate the Cardinal’s run to the Sweet 16, where Stanford lost to a D.J. Augustin-led Texas squad.

At Stanford, Johnson’s teammates could envision a future coach in the making — even if he didn’t see it in himself.

“He’s one of the smartest players I’ve ever played with,” Lopez said. “He was a true point guard, leading people, coaching on the floor. I can’t say I’m surprised by the position he is in now.”

In January 2016, John Johnson died at the age of 68. Six months later, Mitch Johnson joined the Spurs’ staff as a G League assistant.

As with everything in his life to that point, Seattle played a role in getting the gig.

Earlier that summer, the Spurs used a first-round pick on a troubled but talented point guard from Seattle named Dejounte Murray. Having befriended Murray through Seattle’s AAU scene, Johnson was hired in part to help the new rookie acclimate to the NBA.

What happened next surprised exactly nobody from Seattle who knew Johnson. He began to rise up the Spurs’ organizational chart, eventually earning a spot as a front-of-the-bench assistant on Popovich’s staff.

“You can’t be around Mitch for long without falling in love with him,” Kalina said.

In November 2024, Johnson earned his biggest coaching break in a manner he would not have preferred.

Popovich suffered a stroke before an early-season game against Minnesota. Johnson got the nod to fill in for a legend, on an acting basis, through the end of the campaign.

When a still-recovering Popovich opted to retire from coaching last May, Johnson was officially tabbed to succeed the winningest coach in NBA history.

For Johnson, feelings about the life-changing promotion were mixed. Not only was he being asked to replace a five-time NBA champion and Hall of Famer. He was being asked to replace a coach he calls a “friend, father figure, uncle, mentor.”

“I felt a duty and obligation in multiple regards,” Johnson said.

Johnson attacked the challenge the same way he’d attacked every challenge since his first JV game at O’Dea.

“You get lost in the job itself,” Johnson said. “What are you going to do at shootaround and (talking about) transition defense and ‘we’ve got to get this guy working on these fundamentals.’ ”

Johnson’s nose-to-the-grindstone approach appears to have paid off so far. His first full season as the Spurs’ coach could hardly have gone better.

The team finished 62-20, matching the third-best record in club history, and halted a six-season playoff drought with a surprising run to the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference.

The Spurs became the fourth team in NBA annals to reach the 60-victory mark one season after winning fewer than 35 games, and the first to do it since the 2007-08 Boston Celtics.

Johnson is a big reason why.

“I think the biggest achievement is he’s installed himself as the leader of the staff and this team,” All-Star center Victor Wembanyama said. “It feels like he’s been coaching for much longer than (he has). And that’s all him. You can’t buy that. You can’t fake that.”

Those who have witnessed Johnson grow from teenage point guard to NBA head coach aren’t taken aback by the seeming suddenness of his success.

Atlanta coach Quin Snyder, another fellow Seattleite, remembers scouting O’Dea High games as a college coach at Missouri in the early 2000s.

When he watches Johnson stalk the sidelines in San Antonio, he can still squint and see the “Maestro.”

“The type of person he is translates to his coaching,” Snyder said. “You can see the relationships he has formed with his players. I think that level of trust gives you an opportunity to coach them in a more unique way. You can tell the impact he has made on that team when you watch them play.”

In Games 3 and 4 of the upcoming first-round series, Johnson will coach NBA playoff games at the Moda Center in Portland, a three-hour drive from his old high school gym at O’Dea.

Until Seattle is awarded a new expansion team, it is the nearest NBA arena to his hometown.

Though new on the postseason scene — he was still a G League assistant in 2019, the last time the Spurs made the playoffs — Johnson refuses to hide from his status as a first-time playoff coach.

“There are some circumstances you can’t avoid or downplay as much as you’d like to,” Johnson said. “For the most part, things don’t change. We’re preparing and we’re attempting to execute the same things we’ve discussed since October.”

Back in Seattle, a basketball community firmly believes Johnson was built for this.

Kalina remembers the moment he noticed Johnson as a future coach.

It was Johnson’s senior season at O’Dea. That once-distraught 14-year-old was now a confident 18-year-old bent on leading a second-straight state championship charge.

Standing in the way, in the state semifinals, was a team from Columbia River that featured an unassuming bench player who looked like a chess club reject and shot the ball from his hip, but nevertheless could swish 3-pointers like Steph Curry.

Kalina had the scout, and had warned the O’Dea players not to judge a book by its cover or an opponent by his unorthodox jumper.

After that unlikely Columbia River sniper nailed his third open 3-ball in a row, Lumpkin called timeout.

It was Johnson, however, who interrupted and asked to address the huddle. He did so in the form of an impassioned, expletive-riddled pep talk that would have made his future boss in San Antonio blush.

“He wasn’t the kind of kid who usually used that kind of language,” Kalina said. “But something needed to be said, so he said it.”

O’Dea won the game and later the state championship. In that moment, Kalina believes, a future Spurs coach was born.

“You saw what a leader he was,” Kalina mentioned. “From then on, you knew he was destined for great things.”