Mitch Johnson wants the Spurs to learn from their inexperience in the 2026 Playoffs originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
The San Antonio Spurs had a tremendous 2025-26 season, especially since people expected them to gradually progress. However, they surprised a lot of people by fully becoming the team that people expected them to be in a few years.
They have fast-tracked themselves to become one of the league's best teams in a snap. That also meant that people were surprised by how such an inexperienced team was in the NBA Finals, so that was the main critique people had about the Spurs.
Mitch Johnson is ready for the Spurs to shed their inexperienced tag
The Spurs kept proving everyone wrong when people kept bringing up inexperience. However, it eventually caught up to them in the NBA Finals when they lost in five games to the New York Knicks.
Considering head coach Mitch Johnson is also quite an inexperienced coach at the elite level, he has also learned from that defeat. A lot of people now have expectations for them, and it is up to the Spurs to live up to them.
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To do that, the Spurs must do their best to use the experience from the 2026 Playoffs and learn from them. That is a big deal for the Spurs if they want to succeed again and even surpass what they did in the 2025-26 season.
"The word experience got used, or lack thereof, for our group last year. Last year, we had as much experience as anybody. It's interesting how that word can be almost weaponized at times," Johnson said in his interview on SiriusXM NBA Radio.
"We've talked a lot about it, and we're trying to carry every experience we have from last year. The good, the bad, and the successes we've experienced, and the nightmares, the scars, and the things that will never leave us."
It is important to have this kind of mindset because the Spurs definitely surpassed everyone's expectations last season. Now, they are now seen as favorites, so they will have to live up to them.
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