The year is 2017, Utah Jazz fans have just been crushed by the loss of Gordon Hayward. Suddenly, this young guy explodes onto the scene. His name is Donovan Mitchell and Jazz fans think they’ve been rescued. As a Utah Jazz fan who lives in Minnesota, I’m used to being disappointed by my sports teams. When I heard about Donovan Mitchell, I was much more skeptical than other fans.
Mitchell had a good pre-draft workout and had everyone saying, “Hayward who?” A Contributor for the J-Notes on the FanSided network, Tyler Thorpe, wrote an article about how Mitchell was already a star after his first season. This issue I have with this article is the same one I constantly have with Jazz fans. They forget, forgive, and move on too quickly! This article is a perfect example of that.
Thorpe leads off by mentioning several players that Mitchell was compared to his rookie year: Allen Iverson, Damian Lillard, and Dwayne Wade. He wrote, “Those are just a few of the comparisons that Donovan Mitchell received earned over the course of his inaugural NBA season.”
This was not a comparison of their rookie years. It was just a general comparison made based on their play styles. Iverson was already retired, and Wade and Lillard had both been in the league for about a decade when Mitchell was a rookie. How can you compare him to men that have been in the league for years? And, to cross out “received” and replace it with “earned,” I’m not buying that. Mitchell simply had not been in the league long enough at that time to “earn” these comparisons.
Writing phrases like “what can’t this guy do?” and “a star is born” when the guy in question is only 21 and has been in the league for one season, seems extreme. NBA fans and the league love to put rookies on a pedestal and tear them down when they don’t meet expectations in the first couple of years. That’s exactly the situation Mitchell has found himself in the last couple of years.
Thankfully, he can tune out the press and their comments and just plays basketball. He still has off nights and can be inconsistent, but Mitchell has finally proved to me that he can handle the pressure. It’s taken time for him to find his rhythm, but maybe he is worth the hype.