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LOS ANGELES — All Keldon Johnson wanted was his llama.
The NBA Cup comes with a substantial prize: a nice, clean, $530,933 per player if you win it all. That’s enough money to buy a condo in Cabo or a brand new Lambo.
Johnson would like something simpler than that. He’s building a pond at his ranch outside San Antonio. Like everything in Texas, it’s gonna be a big one.
His 11 or 12 goats — he’s lost count by now — four mini cows, two horses, six chickens and one donkey could use another friend to join them. He’s thinking a sheep or a llama.
Yeah, a llama would be nice.
The NBA dangles a half-million-dollar prize in front of players to get them to take the Cup seriously, a necessary incentive. Eventually, they hope the cup will be a rich tradition. But until then, it’ll be a tradition to get richer.
Time builds sentimentality and purpose. The Cup is new, but Johnson’s journey to this point is far from it. The San Antonio Spurs forward has been throwing himself all over the court for seven seasons now, yet he’s never won more than 34 games. He’s never seen the playoffs. Even a whiff of competing in a tournament would be welcomed. It smells a lot better than the stink of the lottery.
Johnson is trying to change that.
On Wednesday, with a trip to Las Vegas for the NBA Cup semifinals on the line, the Los Angeles Lakers got out to a quick lead and showed why they were favored entering the evening. But late in the first quarter, Johnson buried a trio of 3s in a row — 13 points in five minutes, a complete game changer. A few minutes later, the Spurs were up 17 and never looked back.
At halftime, before he went back to the locker room, he stopped to talk to NBA on Prime’s Cassidy Hubbarth, who asked him if he was thinking about that llama.
“Just continue to lean on our good habits, continue to play together,” Johnson said. “And the llama will be within reach.”
Then Johnson went back to the locker room and reflected on the moment.
“I feel like I was in the locker room and honestly, I was saying it felt like we were playing for something; it meant more than just a regular game,” Johnson said after the Spurs’ 132-119 victory. “I feel like we knew that we’re capable of winning this game and we knew that we playing for something.”
Johnson has been having fun with the Cup concept, just as he does with everything else. But that is just the surface layer of a deeper purpose with this club. The Cup presents Johnson with a chance to start a tradition of winning, something he’s been waiting for his whole career.
As the Spurs were losing until this year, his buy-in only got stronger.
“I’ll keep being myself, keep being energetic, cause the tide gonna turn, and I’m still gonna be myself,” Johnson said in November 2023 when the Spurs were on an 18-game losing streak. “So when we start winning, you’ll say, ‘KJ was the same person winning or losing.’ And that’s what it’s gonna be. … But we gonna start winning.”
If there’s one thing the Spurs know is for real so far this season, it’s that KJ is the same person, (mostly) winning or (sometimes) losing. It wasn’t an accident that his coach and his teammates used the same refrain to describe him: heart and soul.
“He puts his body in harm’s way for the betterment of the team every game,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said. “We got a lot of big personalities, and we got a face of the franchise, but that guy’s the heart and soul of the team, and I think you can see it when you watch this team long enough.”
Enough is usually only a few minutes. Johnson puts his mark on the game quickly. He’s a 6-foot-6, vivacious wrecking ball with just enough touch and finesse to make it work.
When he comes into the game, someone is hitting the floor. A possession that should yield nothing becomes a golden opportunity. He’ll see a teammate make a big play and celebrate it like he just won the title. No moment is too big or too small for Johnson to make an impact.
This is the ethos that has held the Spurs together through Victor Wembanyama’s absence. San Antonio has gone 9-3 since he went down with a calf strain in an NBA Cup game against the Golden State Warriors nearly a month ago. Johnson has been biding his time, waiting for the moment when his contributions could lead to winning. The Cup is his chance for everyone to see what he has been building. He’s put in the blood, sweat and tears to prime the team for an ascension, and now they have the talent to take that step forward.
The Cup is his first opportunity to hoist a trophy, to tell the world the Spurs are back.
“As a group, it’s important to us to be able to prove ourselves to the rest of the NBA, that we are a legit team,” Johnson said. “That even though we’re young and we’re putting pieces together, they’re really legit and that we want to come make some noise. And what better way in this first part of the season to make some noise in the cup and go have a run at the cup for real.”
To make the biggest noise, they’re going to need Wembanyama. They have been good without him, but it’s hard to imagine them breaking the Oklahoma City Thunder’s 16-game winning streak without their game-changer.
And it just might happen. When asked if he thinks Wembanyama may return for Saturday’s Cup semifinal against the Thunder, Mitch Johnson said, “Very much so.”
“He had a very good day today,” the coach said. “He had a good intent day this morning, and we’ll have to see how he responds and reacts tomorrow.”
At shootaround on Wednesday morning, Wembanyama did some testing jumping on force plates, which measure impact data from a person’s jumping and landing to help determine if a player is moving with sufficient impact and any imbalances in the lower body. Wembanyama appeared to be somewhat satisfied with the results from the test, which would suggest returning to the floor Saturday is in the cards. While he has been getting in a pre-game warm-up this week, it has been a more abridged and lower-intensity routine than usual.
The Spurs have made it clear they will not rush him back, even for a game they clearly are taking seriously. Winning the NBA Cup would be a crucial step in the franchise’s development under this regime, but they have shown no interest in taking the slightest risk with the grandest prize the lottery has yielded in 22 years.
The Cup prize money means a lot to players at the end of the bench who would see nearly a 40 percent bonus on their annual salary. Two-way players get half of the payout if they are with the team when they win the tournament.
That’s been on Johnson’s mind as he thinks about David Jones-Garcia, the Spurs’ electric rookie guard from the Dominican Republic who is playing with their G League affiliate in Austin now that the team’s point guards are all healthy. While Johnson can use the money, it would be a substantial glow-up for Jones-Garcia. The possibilities of how he could save or waste that money are endless.
“David Jones, papi taking it back to the DR with the Lamborghini truck,” Johnson said. “I said it here first.”
The truth is, Johnson wasn’t even sure what he was going to do with his money before he brought up the llama. Unless he’s purchasing some Vicuñas in the Andes mountains, he’ll probably have some spare change left over. Maybe enough for a Lambo truck or two.
But all the llamas and Lambos in the world can’t make up for losing. The reward of turning a franchise around and winning on his terms is the real prize.
“I mean, obviously, the llama would be great,” he said. “But I feel, ultimately, (I was) just playing for my brothers. I feel like playing for the Spurs organization, that was on my mind.”
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Jared Weiss is a staff writer covering the San Antonio Spurs and Victor Wembanyama for The Athletic. He has covered the Celtics since 2011, co-founding CLNS Media Network while in college before covering the team for SB Nation’s CelticsBlog and USA Today. Before coming to The Athletic, Weiss spent a decade working for the government, primarily as a compliance bank regulator. Follow Jared on Twitter @JaredWeissNBA
