Donovan Mitchell’s recent scoring success at Utah Jazz has earned him a reputation as a draft steal. The No. 13-Pick plays an unusual role for rookies – and is already decisive for the future of his team.
The Utah Jazz season was already hanging by a thread when it hadn’t even started. On the 4th. There was nothing to celebrate in Salt Lake City on July 7th, Indepence Day: Gordon Hayward had decided to change, so the jazz was suddenly without their only all-star. Now they weren’t a wreckage troop all of a sudden, but they thought that they had to do pretty much everything right for them to be able to compete for the playoffs again in the West.
Above all, it depended a lot on Center-Star Rudy Gobert and the Defense. How good the offense would look was unclear – but defensively Utah still had the staff to be frightening. Gobert, on the other hand, should also be given more responsibility in the front and thus finally recognized as the star he was last season.
That’s what they thought – until Gobert turned 10. He was injured in the game against Miami on 11 November and was predicted to be out of action for several weeks.
After that, Utah was on a 5-7 record, aggressively only little worked, which was no wonder. Rodney Hood has strong games at times, but often he just goes underground (and is often injured). Ricky Rubio tried to be a scorer at the beginning of the season, but this is not his nature. Derrick Favors or Joe Ingles are solid third or fourth options, but not go-to-guys. Joe Johnson used to be one, but now he is 36 years old and has only been available in 7 games so far.
So it was a relatively precarious situation that coach Quin Snyder had to face. The solution turned out to be a move he had already made in the said Miami game: For Hood, Rookie Donovan Mitchell moved into the Starting Five. This has now turned out to be more than just the right decision – it could rather be described as a rescue of the (so far) season.
Except for the 13th. Mitchell took second place in the draft, where Denver pulled him out and immediately sent him on to jazz for Tyler Lydon and Trey Lyles. There GM Dennis Lindsey thought that he had drafted a potential wing stopper – at least that’s how Mitchell was described by most scouts in the run-up to the drafts. Offensively, he was awarded potential, but also many homework assignments.
Mitchell himself emphasized time and again that the defense was his priority, because “Offense kommt und geht” (“Open comes and goes”), but one could already get the impression in the Summer League that he didn’t take it quite so literally. 18.2 throws per game were taken on average over five games and scored 39.6 percent of them. Particularly during his two performances in Las Vegas (25 FGA, 36 percent FG) it took on extreme proportions.
Now one could think that this was only the Summer League, but the rookie has no conscience in the real NBA: Mitchell is currently taking the most of all newcomers with 15 litters, although he only meets 41.5 percent of them and thus scores almost 9 percentage points worse than Kyle Kuzma, for example. Mitchell has produced the ninth most misfires of all NBA players so far this season at 220.
But the point is: Snyder encourages him to do so. Utah’s squad is full of defensive skills, but in the front there is a lack of firepower – and in particular of dynamics. Mitchell delivers them in bulk. If he attacks, it makes the game easier for everyone else, even if he doesn’t hit every roll and sometimes wants to get his head through the wall too much.
“Donovan is someone who didn’t have a bad throw in Louisville as far as I know,”Snyder recently said to FanSided,”He just played hard and attacked all the time. We want him to do the same, but there are other people on the court. Let him find his own litter, but let him also make plays for others.”
It’s an unusual situation for a rookie: Although jazz is hungry for victory, Mitchell is allowed to make mistakes, he holds the ball partly in the crunchtime as a point guard and gets a lot of responsibility. He doesn’t always find the right balance, there were also games like against Philly when he hit 3/21 out of the field and played a single assist. But there are also plenty of counter-examples.
3.2 Assists per game don’t necessarily sound outstanding, but no team in the league fits more often than Utah – so it often happens that Mitchell tears a gap, plays the pass and the pass is then swung onto the other wing, where the open shooter pulls the trigger. That doesn’t show up in the boxing score, but it comes from him. The low turnover rate of only 11 percent, which Mitchell has shown so far, is also gratifying in view of the high usage.
Mitchell’s calling card is, of course, scoring. And while his start to the season looked a bit like “High Volume, Low Efficiency”, he seems to be getting along better and better in the league. In the last five games (Utah won four of them) Mitchell played an average of 26.6 points with strong odds (52.3 per cent FG, 46.7 per cent 3FG at 9 (!) tries, whereby not only his 41-point game against New Orleans was enthusiastic.
He combines strong balance, a nasty first step and massive athletics with a more than respectable jumpshot – if you see him currently playing, you regularly wonder how someone like that could fall to 13th position in the draft. Some stars in the league are noticing this now.
“He’s really good. He could be the steal of the entire drafts and is currently one of the two or three best rookies in the league,”said OKC forward Paul George on Tuesday, for example, after Mitchell had once again hung up 31 points against the Thunder.
All in all, a lot of things have turned out to be good for jazz since Mitchell started permanently. Only two of the last nine games were lost, now Gobert is back again and finds a team that doesn’t have to fight it out again, but is in the middle of the playoff race (currently rank 7th). The basis for this is jazz atypical not only the usual strong defense (ratings 99.3;3rd place over the last ten games), but also the offense (115.4; also 3rd place).
Of course, it’s not just Mitchell. The apparently injured Alec Burks showed that he is still to be reckoned with and delivered the jazz the much-needed punch from the bank. Favors stepped in for Gobert impressively well, Ingles scored almost half of his threesome, and Hood also had strong games if he was fit. It seems to be a perfect fit for his game that he is now to deliver scoring from the bank – and little else. Rubio also has his well-known qualities as a trainer and passerby.
No other jazz player has the potential to carry the offense, night after night. Mitchell, too, will have to show whether he will crash into the rookie wall sooner or later, and it is quite possible – at 28.7 percent, he currently has a higher usage rate than, for example, John Wall, which could still haunt him in view of the violent schedule.
Likewise, the jazz season is much more attached to Mitchell than you could have expected in advance. While Utah has a fairly high baseline thanks to its defensive power, Mitchell is the Wild Card, which increases its potential many times over. Also, but not only related to this season. After the Hayward departure, of course, one hopes that Mitchell could become the new star on the wing.
Quite honestly, Utah has got a star,”Pelicans-Center DeMarcus Cousins said recently, after Mitchell turned him around like a flagpole in crunchtime. The young man is slowly gaining recognition in the league. Even if that’s not necessarily to his taste.
“I’m just an underestimated boy,”said the 21-year-old recently to basketball insiders.”I love this role. I just go out and work hard on myself every day. I don’t want anyone to work harder than me. It’s still early, but it’s not only DeMarcus Cousins who knows that Mitchell is on the right track.