SAN FRANCISCO

Warming up for Thursday’s workout, the Raptors were faced with a common practice-court predicament. There were three balls lodged in one basket, suspended in the mesh like so many fish in a net.

It was no big problem, really. Tall men were in abundance. One flick of a wingspan could have alleviated the logjam. But Ed Davis and Jerry Bayless had a different idea. They challenged teammate James Johnson to dislodge the balls with an improbable implement — specifically, his foot. And soon enough Johnson, who is both 6-foot-9 and a black belt in kenpo karate, was wowing the squad with an airborne freak show.

“He looked like a ninja warrior,” marvelled Francesco Cuzzolin, the club’s strength and conditioning coach. “He was jumping in the air, spinning 360 and kicking the balls in the net. His head was over the rim, his legs were splitting, and he’s kicking the balls. It was something I’ve never seen in my life.”

Said Jay Triano, the Raptors coach: “He had to do it, like, five times because nobody could believe it.”

The balls, for the record, did not come out of the mesh. And if that didn’t lessen the amazement of onlookers, Johnson, the former first-round pick who was acquired by the Raptors in a trade with Chicago last month, was blase about the achievement.

“I got challenged. I’m about challenges, so I took it on and tried it,” he said. “I can make my foot touch the rim . . . That was just a spinning back kick. I just jumped to do it.”

If Johnson possesses an unusually vast arsenal of practice-court tricks — he can do a back flip from a standstill, not to mention run at a wall at speed, put a foot into the wall, and do a flip — you can credit his upbringing. His father, Willie Johnson, is a world champion kick boxer and 7th-degree black belt who has trained all nine of his children in various martial arts. His mother, Vi — who sometimes goes by the nickname Vicious — is also a black belt.

And James Johnson, who won various national and world martial arts championships as a youth and has fought mixed martial arts matches in a cage, is a decent enough protege that he once broke a stack of seven bricks with a single well-placed fist.

Breaking bricks, Johnson said, is “mostly mind over matter.”

“That’s how I think when I’m injured. I even told Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah when I was on their team (in Chicago) and they’d twist their ankle or something, ‘Mind over matter.’ They’d laugh. They’d understand, and they’d get it over with,” Johnson said. “I just think pain’s all in the head.”

Pain, on Thursday, stayed back at the team hotel. That’s where Reggie Evans, Amir Johnson and Joey Dorsey remained while their teammates went to work at the tony Olympic Club, this in advance of Friday’s game across San Francisco Bay against Oakland’s Golden State Warriors. Evans was fighting soreness in his surgically repaired foot. Amir Johnson was getting treatment on a chronically sore ankle. Dorsey was battling flu-like symptoms that he may or may not have picked up from his usual locker-room neighbours, DeMar DeRozan and Sonny Weems.

“I think (DeRozan and Weems) had the sniffles before Joey, so they might have given it to (Dorsey),” said Jay Triano, the Raptors coach. “Hopefully they’re over it.”

Johnson, for his part, sounds like he’s over his urge to step into the blood-splattered cage. A native of Cheyenne, Wyoming, he only began playing basketball in earnest in Grade 11, mostly because his friends were on the school team. And he only bowed out of professional fighting when it became clear he could have a future as a big-time college hoopster at Wake Forest, from where he was selected with the 16th overall pick in the 2009 NBA draft.

In his 14 games as a Raptor, all of them as the starting small forward, he is averaging a modest eight points and five rebounds in 25 minutes. But his rawness, while it’s likely one of the reasons the Bulls gave up on him, is also one of the reasons the rebuilding Raptors see the 24-year-old as an intriguing piece.

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“Hopefully I’ll have a long enough basketball career where I don’t have to pursue (professional fighting),” he said. “But the training for it — I’m always going to be doing that for life.”

As for now, as impressive as it is to employ an athlete who can put his foot on the rim, the Raptors are hoping Johnson will point his Bruce Lee-like focus on the not-so-exotic art of putting the ball through the thing. His jump shot is a cringe-worthy work in progress, and the club has an off-season plan to turn it into something more serviceable.