Doubters are wrong about Mitch Johnson—and it’s about to show

"Is Mitch Johnson the guy? You talk to people in the league, they weren't blown away by his playbook last year," is a real sentence spoken by long-time NBA writer, John Hollinger, on The Zach Lowe Show. Every now and then, I'm reminded that front office executives are just regular people, and sometimes ordinary folks make silly statements.

Johnson's situation last season was anything but normal. Had Coach Popovich had his health scare in the offseason, giving his successor time to prepare to lead the team, the criticism would make more sense. That's not what happened, though. He didn't have time to create his own playbook, especially considering everyone believed that Pop was coming back until the end of February.

These critiques are a gross mischaracterization of how Coach Johnson performed in an extremely difficult situation last season, so let's set the record straight.

Mitch Johnson deserves more credit for last season

Coach Pop isn't some run-of-the-mill coach that you can easily substitute. He's a monument, and filling in for him, while uncertain of his return, is a massive burden. It's not fair to just look at what the interim guy did with that situation and judge him on it without adding the nuance of what he had to deal with.

Despite those challenges, he had the team playing fairly well. They were above .500 going into January, overachieving by everyone's standards. Victor Wembanyama made it onto the MVP Ladder in December because he was playing out of his mind. He was in line for a possible All-NBA selection on top of the obvious Defensive Player of the Year award he was going to win.

They stumbled when they got to the toughest part of their schedule in January, but as I said, they were overachieving prior to that, so we can't hand out blame for the negative without giving credit for the positive. And that wasn't the end of what Johnson did well.

His star player goes down with a blood clot five games after they acquired De'Aaron Fox, who was dealing with an injured thumb on his shooting hand. Halfway through March, Fox was ruled out for the season to take care of his injury, so he can be ready for next season. Despite everything going on, the Spurs had the sixth-best offensive rating in the NBA that month.

Not to mention, Stephon Castle won Rookie of the Year under his stewardship. So, there was a lot to like about the job Coach Johnson did last season. Now that he's had a full offseason to get his bearings, we can truly judge him for what he does or doesn't accomplish, but using last year as some sort of referendum on his capabilities is silly and wrong.