The Spurs are the second-youngest team to reach the NBA Finals in the shot-clock era at an average age of 25.06.
SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio Spurs coach Mitch Johnson has given the age-inexperience topic considerable thought.
“Not to get into a rabbit hole,” Johnson began when asked Tuesday at NBA Finals Media Day about the Spurs’ youth.
But that’s exactly where Johnson went. It’s clear he had been there before. He had to.
It was imperative for him, considering his star player, Victor Wembanyama, is 22 years old, and other key players are 25 or younger, including Dylan Harper, 20; Carter Bryant, 20; Stephon Castle, 21; Julian Champagnie, 24; and Devin Vassell, 25.
Johnson wanted to make sure his team didn’t buy into the notion that it wasn’t ready for a deep playoff run or that, because most of its key rotation players had never appeared in a playoff game before this season, it lacked the experience necessary to win a championship.
Don’t let that be a reason for not doing something special.
The Spurs are the second-youngest team to reach the NBA Finals in the shot-clock era at an average age of 25.06 (average age weighted by playing time). That is just slightly older than the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers (25.03) and a half-year younger than the 2024-25 Oklahoma City Thunder.
A rabbit hole is a place to ferret out the truth. So he began explaining.
“I do think experience matters,” Johnson said Tuesday, a day before Game 1 of the NBA Finals against the New York Knicks. “I just think a lot of times we use the term ‘anticipated’ or ‘expecting’ not necessarily knowing how it’s going to be used. I draw upon a ton of experiences, not as a head coach in the NBA, but I’ve been around the game of basketball for 30-plus years.
“There’s a lot of things we talk about every single day more than experience.”
Why belabor that fact when there’s nothing you can do about it? From the start of training camp this season through Monday, Johnson said, “If we kept track of the amount of times we talked about – again I’ve said this, not to be redundant – habits, consistency, execution, fundamentals, attention to details, style of play, brand of basketball, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera … we’ve said all those words 100 times more than the word experience.
“It allowed us to anchor to those things when we have adversity or success or instability or different things that you go through that you can’t always control, you tend to anchor to something.”
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Guard De’Aaron Fox was the only Spurs rotation player who had Game 7 experience prior to Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team that won two Game 7s in last season’s playoffs.
What role did playoff and Game 7 experience play in that game?
“It’s important to a certain extent, but like I said before, we have talent, we have dogs and we’re like, ‘at the end of the day, you got to roll the ball out there and you got to beat us four times,’ and that’s just the way that we approach it,” Fox said.
Throughout the season and playoffs, the Spurs have refused to use inexperience as an excuse, and what they accomplished during the season helped them see what was possible despite their age. They won 62 regular-season games, reached the NBA Cup Final, had two winning streaks of 11 games, excelled in the Western Conference Finals, beating the defending champion Thunder to reach the Finals.
The Spurs don’t believe it’s necessary to conform to a traditional notion of what a championship team looks like in order to win title. They have a season’s worth of evidence to support their claim.
“I don’t think that was ever a problem for us,” Spurs guard Stephon Castle said. “For us, that was all outside noise. In-house, we have nothing but confidence in each other. We take it game by game, try to walk this thing down. We got to this point, so …”
When you can’t lean on experience, you dig into the strengths you possess.
“Our consistency and togetherness just screamed great habits throughout our locker room,” Castle said. “With our leader being Vic, with how good he is, with how young he is, for him to not have any ego, it just fed great energy throughout our locker room.
“Especially early to start this year in January, went on that long run where we won I don’t know how many games in a row. Just that kind of confidence and that kind of groove coming into the playoffs is what you want. We hit our stride at the right time.
“Yeah, also we have the best player in the world on our team.”
Wembanyama, Castle, Harper, Bryant, Vassell and Champagnie on the NBA’s biggest stage trying to prove that youth is not wasted on the young.
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Jeff Zillgitt has covered the NBA since 2008. You can email him at jzillgitt@nba.com, find his archive here and follow him on X.
