Spurs fans - there seems to be a general dislike of Mitch Johnson’s coaching, apparently he’s not running a well-structured offense

Spurs fan are a bit spoiled. This is a fanbase that had a two decade run of greatness with the GOAT coach at the helm for the full run. Mitch gets exactly 0 grace given by the fans since he’s not literally as good as Pop in his first few seasons. It’s a brutal expectation, but it just is where are right now. Spurs fan are used to an amazing personality manager, floor general, emotional center of the team and Mitch is still learning, though he took a team to the finals in literally YEAR 1 PEOPLE.

Mitch’s biggest strengths in my opinion so far are in strategic development and planning. You can clearly see he has a plan for every one of our core players and is pushing them down that path:

Harper: The want Harper to be the primary on ball player in the future. You’ll see his assists climb, climb, climb over the course of the season is my bet

Castle: They want him to guard the opposing team’s best player regardless of who it is and to shoot 3 pointers

Fox: Mitch wants him to fight on defense and not be a soft defender anymore

Vassell: Continue being the 3&D beast that he is

Wemby: Develop his post game and become the league’s best lob threat.

You can watch game to game as the coaching is taking root and these players are developing. It’s great to see. People forget that the core of this team is 22/21/20. They’re children right now and Mitch is developing them all.

On to legitimate criticism: He’s not a great in game manager yet. In terms of making adjustments on the fly, inside a series or inside a game, he hasn’t shown a spark for it yet. Is it fair to expect a guy in his first few seasons to out coach some of the best coaches in the league? Not really, but Mitch is following in Pop’s footsteps so expectations are always going to be absurdly unfair for him.

He’s significantly better than people are giving him credit for and I think longterm the team is in good hands.

A lot of the dislike of his coaching is related to his poor game management at times. There were a few games last year where the spurs blew big leads because they allowed the opposing team to get on these ridiculous heaters and Mitch struggled to adjust or even just call a timeout. This is what killed them in the finals series. Poor game management (and only having a 7 player rotation v a 10 player rotation). Offensively people didn’t love the coaching because it was very disorganized and there didn’t seem to be any direction or a lot of sets. I think the offense has looked significantly better this year and Mitch’s decision making has improved, but time will tell. Last year was his first year at the reigns and he just needs experience. He always seems like he’s trying to improve and open to changing and trying different things

My issues with him have been game management and development and i think they are fair criticisms. We’re still a great basketball team and are in every game no matter what, but he still needs to learn and grow as a coach too

My biggest issues this year with the rotations so far have been the first 10 game stretch where he was deathly afraid to play many of the younger guys for like no reason.

Luke Kornet was a bit better today but objectively is/was having a horrendous start to the season yet refusal to even let our new big Tarris Reed Jnr have any time on the floor in non-garbage minutes is a bit baffling. Same thing with Carter Bryant but his minutes are slowly ramping up, we’ve stuck with the vets in games like the Kings or the Jazz where it’d be super beneficial to let our younger guys get time in with real roster rotations and against starting NBA players but he just hasn’t done that

Case in point Vassell gets injured so now Carter Bryant’s minutes pick up and he is green af still (though played well today)

I just hate the potential idea that say Wemby or Kornet go down with an injury to rule them out, suddenly Tarris Reed is the back up and will play at least 15min a night and so far he still has yet to take the court with any of the 3 guards or Vassell/Champ, if we get to a big match up and have to rely on him I think we’re cooked

We just have a lot of casual fans (because Wemby) who think they’re hardcore fans. Mitch took a team that most thought would be a play-in team at best to the finals in his first season as head coach. He’s 10-2 to start this season. He was hand picked by Pop for a reason, and he coaches a lot like Pop in that the regular season is basically training camp for the playoffs. Lots of experimentation with lineups and rotations. Let the guys play and don’t get bogged down in running offenses or sets. That’s how they learn to play together. If it costs him some regular season wins, who cares? Pop got away with that because he was so respected. Casuals don’t recognize that Mitch does the same thing, he just doesn’t have a fistful of rings to tell the haters off with. Mitch is fine.

He’s doing fine, we just have a bunch of petulant new fans that act like the sky is falling and like to scapegoat any time something doesn’t go right. Most recently bitching about the 3 guard lineup (in before “actually it’s 4 guards”) not clicking immediately after just a couple games into the season. Mitch’s sets with the 3 guards/Wemby have been great getting consistent high percentage looks

Edit: not surprisingly a lot of comments giving Donovan the credit when everything goes right. Same shit last year, if anything went well from an execution standpoint it must have been Sweeney, anything goes bad it’s Mitch’s fault lol

Assistant coach Billy Donovan has helped as well

Guards are doing a much better job finding him at the rim, but we don’t have much structure beyond that

They’re doing a better job of running plays designed to get Wemby the ball at the rim. They struggled to start the season, but a bunch of soft opponents (Jazz 2x, Kings 2x) sense to be just what Spurs needed to get things going.

Mitch is fine. There was a directive to start the three guards, so it’s a lot of new rotations, and it’s going to change again when Harris is ready to play.

The Victor-at-the-rim offense where everyone from the three guards to Vassell to Keldon finds Vic diving to the rim as a first option appears to be working. The Vic-off minutes are still a work in progress, but we’ve won ten straight so not going to evaluate until Harris is back. That’s exactly what we got him for, to be an offensive hub when Vic sits.

Anyone coming after Pop would suffer the same fate.

It feels like the offensive philosophy has greatly benefitted from having an assistant coach with a high offensive pedigree

It’s mostly his rotations.

As of now, the starters have all been fine but the bench has been dreadful. Doesn’t help that Wemby’s main back up is playing atrociously bad where he seemingly negates everything positive that Wemby produces but in a fraction of the time.

We did see some adjustments in this game though, for instance, Mitch went to Carter Bryant more in the 2nd half over Harrison Barnes, whose game has also fallen off a cliff, and that worked. So maybe Mitch will just start giving Carter more of Barnes’ minutes if Mitch realizes that it was a great move

I feel like our new assistant coach got something to do with it

I think Billy Donovan(new Associate Head Coach) might be responsible for the get-Vic-the-ball-inside offense they’re running more of this year. Everyone knows the guard hydra are all threats, so Wemby has more opportunities

The system is working. Mitch is excellent at game to game adjustments. Please ignore those spoiled ass fans, who want to fire a coach during a 10 game win streak.

We’ve been running more and more pindowns all over the floor to get the lob action going, but it’s tough to say whether they’re working because they’re good sets or whether we’re just facing terrible defenses.

The Spurs aren’t exactly running through a gauntlet right now in the schedule. The best team they faced since their loss to Houston has been the Blazers.

We started the season not running a well structured offense. A lot of iso, guys just standing around doing nothing. It definitely took the team about 2 weeks of games to start playing cohesively. They still don’t know what to do with the second unit once wemby sits. They ran the gortat screen once today with harper and he scored easily. That play needs to be harper’s bread and butter with kornet because he provides nothing else on offense.

Since the rockets game we haven’t really faced any adversity where he has needed to make in game adjustments so that’s still a TBD. Tonight the bulls had a magnet ball from 3 shooting 70% but we were only down 14 at the half so you knew they’d cool off.

There’s a bit left to be desired but he has made some improvements. It just started off really bad with the offense looking clunky with the 3 PG lineup.

He seems to have no feel for a good rotation, makes awful time out decisions, and I think is generally bailed out by having so much talent.

These are casuals, not Spurs fans. Or at least not Spurs fans that have been around for more than 2 to 3 years. Mitch is doing pretty good, especially bringing A+ assistants to put good shit on the court. Right now they’re absolutely cooking with Vic.

Basically none of us agree. You got guys saying a very green rookie in Reed should be splitting minutes with Kornet and Mitch’s rotations are garbage… yet our starting line up is the best in the league rn. Wemby is undeniably more effective after relenting to the coaches offensive direction (ie stop playing iso at the three point line and let your guards feed you off sets).

I think Mitch deserves more credit but even I have reservations on if he has that X factor of a championship winning coach. But to be far the ol ‘ism’ is true for a reason: champions are made.

The most legitimate criticism in my opinion is his slowness to react. Timeouts against opposing runs are too late. Way too late. And he can put out a ghastly rotation for an entire half quarter and let the opponents offense just route us. I think his slowness is building trust and credit within the team but possibly at the cost of efficiency. And the finals last year were a good example of being out-coached in my opinion.

I just suggest reading Zach Lowe’s latest piece on his substack to see how much variations we have on offense, especially putting Castle on a Draymond Green-esque role as a distributor. And these credits should be given to Mitch. I was sceptical to 3-guard lineup, but it works amazingly.

saw that the Bulls were ¹⁹⁄₂₂ at the half and knew immediately it wasn’t going to last

also I didn’t have that gut wrench I usually have watching Spurs games

Bulls were as hot as any team I’ve ever seen in the first half, that was WILD.

I can think of one last June that was a little more obvious

Might as well blow it up, can’t win with these cats

+29 in a 5 point win. Sorry Luka but the MVP is Wembys rn.

Would be lucky if the Spurs can get Jake LaRavia and a second at this rate

Victim Wembamyama needed the best player on the Bulls to leave the game with an injury in the third quarter before he could get a win.

His middy looked awesome tonight, too

I didn’t get to watch this game but usually if he has a miss in the paint, he can rebound it himself and put it back easily. I’d love to see the percentage of possessions that featured a miss followed by an offensive rebound and make/FT’s.

Wasn’t even a great defensive game for him

I’m ready to say it. Are y’all ready to say it? Wemby, a 22 year old, is the best player in the NBA.

No disrespect to Luka. He’s having an MVP level season. I’m not debating that. But Wemby is officially the best player in the NBA imo.

The MVP race is between wemby and whether he gets injured.

22 pt comeback win, not 20. , yes I know he’s 22

Celtics and Spurs 😻 so hot right now

Hell win the next 3-4 dpoys til the voters give chet or one of the thompson’s a pity dpoy

Ain’t nothing to rebound in the 1st half with those magnets

In all fairness the bulls starters were playing like butt. Our bench outscored and out rebounded our starters, the starters 16 of our 19 turnovers and only 1 of our combined 7 steals/blocks

Ofc some of that is because your starters esp wemby were destroying us but genuinely our starters are not good especially when no Norman Powell.

Wait Luka got injured?

How did luka get injured

Huh what happened?

Luka injured??

It’s really not that big a gap. You say this as if the lakers don’t have the best record either currently