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SALT LAKE CITY — Donovan Mitchell had the list ready; it was an inventory of all the dismissive things he’s heard about him and his game throughout the years: the inefficient chucker, the selfish player, the sixth man with a shoe deal.
“I love hearing negative things about me,” Mitchell said.
He better remember them because the negative comments are drying up fast.
Less than a week after he had a 57-point explosion — the third-most points ever scored in a playoff game — in a Game 1 overtime loss to the Denver Nuggets, Mitchell had a sequel — a 51 point performance in Sunday’s Game 4 victory to give the Utah Jazz a 3-1 lead in the series.
"(Donovan Mitchell) is becoming a superstar!" Dwyane Wade tweeted following the game.
Becoming? He may already be there.
Mitchell is the leading scorer in the playoffs at 39.5 points per game — 6 points more than reigning Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard, who’s second. He's also shooting 51.5% from three on 8.8 attempts and averaging 5.8 assists per game. Oh, and he’s the only active player to have scored 50 points twice in a playoff game.
LeBron hasn't done it, neither has Steph, or Dame, or anyone else — just the 23-year-old Jazz guard. He joins Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson as the only players to score 50 points or more twice in the same series.
This postseason, Mitchell has joined rare air.
But when the All-Star guard was informed about some of the history involved in his performance, he shrugged it off.
"I haven’t done anything yet," Mitchell said in his walk-off interview on TNT. "All we did was win Game 4. 50 is 50, but we are looking to close this series out."
That’s how superstars think. That’s what superstars do.
This run of play isn’t a fluke. When the world stopped as the novel coronavirus reared its ugly head, Mitchell went to work. He treated like it was another offseason — one without distractions and obligations. There were no shoe tours or international tournaments to play in, he was confined to a house. He used that time as a chance to step back and evaluate his game.
He already had all the skills — the soft touch, the creative finishes, the vision and passing ability — he just needed to put it all together. He examined what he was doing wrong in various situations; he identified the reads he was missing and the plays he was leaving on the court; he remembered last year’s playoffs when the series loss to the Houston Rockets was defined by him driving into traffic and throwing up flailing shots. Those weren’t the right plays — he knew it — and he didn’t want to repeat it.
"For me, watching a lot of film over quarantine, you really couldn’t go anywhere, so at the end of the day I (was) in my room watching film for hours upon hours and just trying to find ways to get better," Mitchell said.
In the basement of his mother’s house in Connecticut, Mitchell reshaped his game.
Through four games of the postseason, he’s a different player — and, frankly, has been one of the best in the league. He's been an elite 3-point shooter, he's drawing more contact (he's averaged 11.0 free throws per game, even more than James Harden), and he's not settling for many floaters. He's hit the big shots, put up the big numbers, and he's led his team to three-straight wins.
His coach sees him only getting better.
"The more reps he gets, the better his reads are," Jazz coach Quin Snyder said. "He’s making the right play. He’s taking his three, looking back in pick-and-roll, shooting his pull-up. He really attacked the basket, and I think for him that’s something that he’s worked on a lot and thought about a lot. For him to get to the line as much as he did tonight, that makes it even more difficult to defend."
For Mitchell, all the extra work he did was to prepare him for now — for when the clock runs dry and the season rests upon whether or not he made a play. He, and his team, is confident he'll keep making plays.
"Moments like these are going to come, and I've just got to be ready," Mitchell said. "There’s no secret, last year’s playoffs wasn’t my best and I took that personally and, at the end of the day, I’m going to trust my work and keep moving forward."
