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The Spurs are the second-youngest team to reach the NBA Finals in the shot-clock era at an average age of 25.06.<\/p>\n
SAN ANTONIO \u2013 San Antonio Spurs coach Mitch Johnson has given the age-inexperience topic considerable thought.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot to get into a rabbit hole,\u201d Johnson began when asked Tuesday at NBA Finals Media Day about the Spurs\u2019 youth.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s exactly where Johnson went. It\u2019s clear he had been there before. He had to.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Johnson wanted to make sure his team didn\u2019t buy into the notion that it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t let that be a reason for not doing something special.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A rabbit hole is a place to ferret out the truth. So he began explaining.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think experience matters,\u201d Johnson said Tuesday, a day before Game 1 of the NBA Finals against the New York Knicks. \u201cI just think a lot of times we use the term \u2018anticipated\u2019 or \u2018expecting\u2019 not necessarily knowing how it\u2019s going to be used. I draw upon a ton of experiences, not as a head coach in the NBA, but I\u2019ve been around the game of basketball for 30-plus years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of things we talk about every single day more than experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why belabor that fact when there\u2019s nothing you can do about it? From the start of training camp this season through Monday, Johnson said, \u201cIf we kept track of the amount of times we talked about \u2013 again I\u2019ve said this, not to be redundant \u2013 habits, consistency, execution, fundamentals, attention to details, style of play, brand of basketball, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera \u2026 we\u2019ve said all those words 100 times more than the word experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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\u2019t always control, you tend to anchor to something.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Association discusses how Mitch Johnson has created another winning culture in San Antonio.<\/p>\n
Guard De\u2019Aaron 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\u2019s playoffs.<\/p>\n
What role did playoff and Game 7 experience play in that game?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important to a certain extent, but like I said before, we have talent, we have dogs and we\u2019re like, \u2018at the end of the day, you got to roll the ball out there and you got to beat us four times,\u2019 and that\u2019s just the way that we approach it,\u201d Fox said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Spurs don\u2019t believe it\u2019s necessary to conform to a traditional notion of what a championship team looks like in order to win title. They have a season\u2019s worth of evidence to support their claim.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think that was ever a problem for us,\u201d Spurs guard Stephon Castle said. \u201cFor 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 \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
When you can\u2019t lean on experience, you dig into the strengths you possess.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur consistency and togetherness just screamed great habits throughout our locker room,\u201d Castle said. \u201cWith 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cEspecially early to start this year in January, went on that long run where we won I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, also we have the best player in the world on our team.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wembanyama, Castle, Harper, Bryant, Vassell and Champagnie on the NBA\u2019s biggest stage trying to prove that youth is not wasted on the young.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Jeff Zillgitt has covered the NBA since 2008. You can email him at\u00a0jzillgitt@nba.com<\/a>, find\u00a0his archive here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0follow him on X<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Spurs are the second-youngest team to reach the NBA Finals in the shot-clock era at an average…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":680993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,5489,99,17654],"class_list":["post-680992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-nba","tag-nba-finals","tag-sports","tag-spurs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}