Spurs’ Road Back to the Finals Runs Through Spurs coach Mitch Johnson’s Three-Guard Gamble

All preseason, the Spurs have been telling anyone who asks that nothing is guaranteed and that they will not skip steps. Then their coach made the least cautious call on the board. Mitch Johnson will start De’Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper together around Victor Wembanyama, the same three guards whose shared minutes bled points during the run that took San Antonio to the Finals, even as every pairing inside that trio was winning.

That decision says more about this season than the humility does. Publicly, the Spurs will not say what went wrong against New York. Structurally, Johnson has already answered. His lineup card reads as a verdict that the Finals were lost in the half court, late, when the offense narrowed down to one target, and that the fix is more players who can start the action, not fewer.

What the Finals actually showed

The record is public even if the diagnosis is private. San Antonio held double-digit leads in every game of the series and still lost it in five, with the Knicks coming back each time. The Athletic traced the pattern to a half-court offense that went stale down the stretch. Wembanyama’s own summary from the podium was about repetition: “[All] five games this series had the same scenario,” he said, pointing to “how relentless we were in our mistakes, and [how] they were in punishing them.”

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Castle says the group now has “a lot of clarity on why we feel like we lost.” Nobody in the building has spelled out what that clarity is. After the 2013 Finals collapse, Gregg Popovich made his players sit through the film of Games 6 and 7 before the next training camp. Johnson’s version of that film session is a starting five.

The numbers Johnson is overriding

Last season the three guards barely shared the floor. NBA.com counts 25 regular-season minutes together, and those minutes went badly. ESPN Research puts the trio at 69 minutes across the whole campaign, 25 of them in the Finals, and outscored by 47 points. The two-guard pairs inside the trio all won their regular-season minutes: Fox and Castle at plus-9.4, Fox and Harper at plus-6.2, Harper and Castle at plus-11.0.

Johnson reads that as an unfinished puzzle, not a failed one. “We saw it at times with the three guards in addition to what you can do around Victor,” he said. “There’s definite growth for those three guys just in terms of playing off each other.” The staff change points the same way. Billy Donovan, who replaced Sean Sweeney as lead assistant when Sweeney left to coach Orlando, has been drilling all three at once in practice. Fox named the precedent: in Oklahoma City, Donovan “had Dennis [Schroder], Shai [Gilgeous-Alexander] and [Chris Paul]. So, he’s been able to make it work.”

The design: a puppeteer, not a target

The idea underneath is about Wembanyama’s job. Johnson wants him “almost puppeteering the game,” forcing the defense to make a decision and then punishing it. With one creator beside him, a defense can load up on a single action. With three, any of them can run the pick-and-roll with a 7-foot-4 center, and the help has to guess. Wembanyama described it after the lineup’s preseason debut: “I’ve got handlers all around me, guys that we want to put the ball in their hands and pick and roll around me. That makes things easier.”

The weak point is spacing. None of the three has a track record as an elite shooter, and Fox put it plainly: “It’s gonna be predicated on how we shoot the ball.” Harper is the variable to watch. As a rookie he mostly avoided rhythm threes above the break; in his first preseason start, against Atlanta, he took more than twice as many threes as twos and made three of five. Size is the other cost. Castle, at 6-foot-6, is the tallest of the three.

The debut showed both faces. Against Phoenix the new unit managed three points in the first five minutes on 1-of-10 shooting, without a point or an assist from any of the three guards. Then San Antonio scored 38 in the second quarter and won 123-103, with Fox, Castle and Harper combining for 31 points in the first half.

Game 8

The first test arrives immediately. The Spurs open on Tuesday night at Frost Bank Center against Oklahoma City, the team they beat in a seven-game Western Conference final, in a rematch billed locally as “Game 8” (8:30 p.m. CT, NBC and Peacock). No team has reached consecutive Finals since the 2018-19 Warriors, and San Antonio’s only notable free-agent addition was Tobias Harris, so the improvement has to come from inside the rotation.

Johnson says he will “take the expectations.” He has also taken the one lineup last season’s data argued against. The first time the Spurs’ half court stalls against the Thunder, the question in San Antonio will not be about Wembanyama. It will be about which guard sits.

Tags: San Antonio Spurs, Victor Wembanyama, De'Aaron Fox, Dylan Harper, Mitch Johnson

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