Mitch Johnson, the Spurs Coach Who Replaced Popovich and Is Still Learning to Close

Mitch Johnson

Photo: CLNS Media Press Room / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 29, 1986 Seattle
Occupation	Basketball Player
Honours	G League 2018
Individual awards	NBA Western Conference Coach of the Month · NBA Western Conference champion

Mitch Johnson has now coached two finals against the New York Knicks, and his Spurs were ahead in both. In Las Vegas they led by double digits late in the third quarter and lost by double digits. In the NBA Finals they built double-digit leads in every game and won only one, and at Madison Square Garden a cushion of nearly thirty points became a one-point defeat, the largest lead ever surrendered in a Finals game. Oklahoma City coach Mark Daigneault, who has known Johnson since both were G League assistants, describes a man who “doesn’t get up and down.” Nobody in San Antonio still asks whether he belongs in Gregg Popovich’s chair. The question now attached to his name is about endings.

There is an irony buried in that. Long before he ran the bench, ESPN reported, Popovich had Johnson draw up late-game strategy in the huddle. The assistant the Spurs trusted with the last two minutes is now the head coach judged almost entirely on them.

A point guard’s education

Home was Seattle, and the family trade was basketball. His father, John Johnson, was a two-time All-Star who won the 1979 championship with the SuperSonics. Mitchell Chase Johnson, born there on November 29, 1986, grew into a point guard who passed first: at O’Dea High School he averaged 22 points and eight assists as a senior and won two state titles.

Stanford came next, four years as a starter between 2005 and 2009 alongside Brook and Robin Lopez and Landry Fields. Teammates called him Maestro. He left second on the program’s career assists list with 534, and he still owns its single-game record: 16 assists in an overtime win over Marquette in the second round of the 2008 NCAA tournament. Brook Lopez later called him “the highest basketball IQ I’ve ever played with or been around.”

The playing career was brief. Undrafted, he played in seven games for the Tulsa 66ers of the D-League before being waived, had a short spell with VEF Riga in Latvia, and then turned to coaching.

The Seattle detour

The route back to the NBA ran through youth gyms. Johnson coached AAU basketball in Seattle, and one of his players was Dejounte Murray, who has recalled that Johnson came to get him out of juvenile detention when he was 15. When San Antonio vetted Murray before the 2016 draft, the front office noticed the coach as well. After a season as an assistant at the University of Portland, Johnson joined the Austin Spurs, the club’s G League affiliate, and won a league title there in 2018.

Popovich brought him onto the NBA staff in 2019 and moved him to the front of the bench in 2020, into the seat Tim Duncan left. He was Devin Vassell’s player development coach and worked on the floor with Victor Wembanyama from the Frenchman’s first summer in San Antonio. “He’s the brains of all of this,” Vassell would later say.

Then the job arrived without warning. On November 2, 2024, Popovich suffered a mild stroke, and Johnson coached that night’s game against Minnesota with a few hours’ notice. The Spurs won 113-103. Popovich never returned to the sideline, and when he stepped down in May 2025 after 29 seasons and 1,422 regular-season wins, moving into the president’s office, Johnson was named his successor. The NBA credited him with the 32-45 record from his interim stint.

“I’m not Pop,” he told the Associated Press, “so I can’t lead how he did.” The difference showed in small choices. Popovich disliked fouling to protect a three-point lead late in games; in the NBA Cup semifinal against Oklahoma City, Johnson had his players do it three times, and San Antonio won 111-109.

Sixty-two wins

The season that followed was a 28-win jump, from 34 victories to a 62-20 record, first place in the Southwest Division and the No. 2 seed in the West, achieved while Wembanyama missed 12 of the first 25 games. Johnson was the Western Conference coach of the month for December, coached the West’s team at the All-Star Game in Inglewood and finished third in Coach of the Year voting, behind Boston’s Joe Mazzulla and Detroit’s J.B. Bickerstaff.

The playoffs went further than the rebuild had any right to. San Antonio beat Portland in five games, Minnesota in six and the defending champion Thunder in seven, after trailing 3-2 in the Western Conference finals. The Spurs reached their first Finals since 2014, and Johnson became the first Stanford alumnus to coach in one.

The case against him

New York exposed what the run had hidden. In Game 2, with the score tied at 104 and Wembanyama holding a defensive rebound with 13.5 seconds left, Johnson chose not to call timeout. Wembanyama’s pass hit Stephon Castle in the back, Jalen Brunson was fouled on the recovery and the Knicks won on a free throw. Game 3 went to San Antonio at the Garden. In Game 4 the Spurs led by 29, scored 14 and 16 points in the last two quarters and lost 107-106. Magic Johnson argued publicly that Wembanyama should have sat late in the third quarter; others went after the timeouts Johnson left unused while the lead drained away.

Some of that ignored a first full season and a young roster. The pattern was harder to wave off. The Cup final in December had followed the same script, an 11-point lead turned into an 11-point loss. After the 94-90 defeat in Game 5 in San Antonio, Johnson did not argue the point: his team, he said, had not been ready to win a championship, and the better team had won.

Game 8

The offseason answers were structural. Johnson hired Billy Donovan, the former Thunder and Bulls head coach, as his lead assistant after Sean Sweeney left to coach Orlando. And he chose a starting lineup last season’s numbers argued against: De’Aaron Fox, Castle and Dylan Harper together around Wembanyama, a trio ESPN Research had outscored by 47 points in 69 minutes, 25 of them in the Finals. Johnson wants his center “almost puppeteering the game,” surrounded by three players who can start the action so that no defense can load up on one.

Off the court he keeps a low profile; he and his wife, Jessica, have four children. His second full season began on October 20 at Frost Bank Center against Oklahoma City, the team his Spurs eliminated in seven games, in a rematch billed locally as “Game 8.” Johnson has said he will “take the expectations.” The ones that matter now are specific: a lead held to the final buzzer, in a game that decides something.

Tags: sports, athletes, nba, new york knicks, San Antonio Spurs, Victor Wembanyama, basketball coaches, Mitch Johnson