Team USA Summer Foreshadows a New Complexity for Mitchell

An upgraded supporting cast poses a new intellectual challenge for #45. (Melissa Majchrzak via ESPN.com)

Donovan Mitchell is in a great place. Let’s just get that out of the way first. He’s fine.

Yes, you heard some of the same specious narratives surface about Mitchell after his experience with USA Basketball this summer. While the red, white and blue went 6-2 in China on the way to a disappointing 7th-place finish at the FIBA World Cup, the attempts to assign their underperformance to Utah’s third-year guard are lazy at best. Mitchell was one of Team USA’s absolute stars, and had several stretches where he was the best player on the floor.

Mitchell did have some rough moments at the World Cup if you zoom into individual plays or stretches, but overall he did what the team needed of him. While people are out there describing his performance as a little on the chucky side, he only took 11 shots per game (in 27 minutes), which is precisely what you’d want from your second best scorer. He also led the team in assists¹, had the best assist-to-turnover ratio by far, and shot efficienty overall. He hit 47% of his shots, including 41% from downtown. 

On the macro, his performance didn’t line up with the unconscionable chucker analysis that came from some observers. Frankly, if Mitchell plays that efficiently for the Jazz this season, he’ll be an All-Star and they’ll be playing into late May. So let’s abandon that sloppy narrative and recognize that Mitchell had a great summer.

At the same time, his Team USA experience did portend what will be the next great challenge for Mitchell on a reloaded Jazz team. At the World Cup, Mitchell was surrounded by creators, guys who are first or second options in the NBA. It was interesting to watch his decision-making as he figured out the right degree to assert himself on a team with more offensive weapons.

We’re talking about decision-making in a broader sense here, not the micro, moment-to-moment decisions like, Do I shoot or pass here? The experience that Mitchell had in China that, frankly, he hasn’t really had at all during his Jazz career was about feeling the dynamic shift and assessing how much he needed to impact the game and take control for his team. 

Over the course of his first two Jazz seasons, Mitchell has had a pretty simple decision tree in that sense:

Does my team need me to take control?  ——>   Yes.

There’s a reason Mitchell took a shot or free throw trip about every 1.57 minutes last season: his team needed him to. Mitchell has had good players around him in Utah. But he hasn’t played with a Kemba Walker-level offensive threat, or secondary options like Khris Middleton and Jayson Tatum, both capable of regularly taking over for a stretch.

Rudy Gobert is a top-15 NBA player by overall impact, but he doesn’t demand the ball on offense. And the others with whom Mitchell has shared a court, like Joe Ingles and Ricky Rubio, have many strengths but aren’t exactly first or second options types. He’s never had to — oversimplification alert — take turns with another primary scorer, or even operate in an environment where there are multiple guys capable of regularly taking the reins.

He did at FIBA, and consequently he had a shooting possession every 2.38 minutes, a 50% greater interval than in the NBA last season. He waspart of a more balanced offensive machine, one of five players² to take between eight and 11 shots per game. Flanked by all that offensive talent, Mitchell’s decision tree grew more complex, both in individual possessions and in the broader sense of just how much he chose/needed to assert himself for stretches or games. 

Overall, he read those situations well. If anything, he erred on the side of trusting the pecking order established by his USA teammates’ NBA résumés, specifically deferring to Walker. That’s tendency is easy to understand given Kemba’s reputation as a legit NBA assassin, but there were times that it cost Team USA. Against Gobert’s France squad, Mitchell had a 14-point quarter to take his team to the fourth with a lead, but then shot just twice in the final frame as Walker missed his final five shots. Others might point to other stretches where Mitchell either pressed or deferred to much, but the point is this: for the first time in a long time, he had the luxury of making that calculus and not having the nature of the roster around him make that decision for him.

It will be fun and interesting to watch Mitchell figure that out on a roster that suddenly gives him the option to vary between taking charge, taking a back seat, or taking turns.

Mike Conley is a borderline All-Star, and someone who has averaged 25% usage with above-average efficiency for the past six seasons. Bojan Bogdanovic is a lethal shooter who added to his repertoire so he could lead Indiana’s offense last season. Both have led an offense, both can score with the ball or in catch-and-shoot situations, and both are smart and savvy complements to Mitchell. With those two in the fold, Ingles can return to his rightful role as a spot-up wizard, tertiary pick-and-roll creator, and defensive specalist. Now, Mitchell doesn’t have to be the keystone of the offense every minute he’s on the floor.

Mitchell’s summer with Team USA might have presented us with the first evidence of how he’ll navigate through the options, and if so, it’s encouraging. Just imagine if the third-year guard could inch closer to the .572 true shooting he posted in China, even if it came with a usage tradeoff. It’s not like this was a true “Dream Team” of NBA stars where the results are wholly inapplicable to Mitchell’s Jazz reality. The way the final USA roster took shape, Mitchell found himself in a similar role to the one that awaits him this fall: essentially co-first option³ with a ball-handling guard, but with other capable creators around him.

That will especially help Mitchell and the Jazz in closer games. Mitchell used 43.3% of Utah’s clutch possessions when he was on the floor, the largest share of any NBA player not named James Harden and more than double the rate of any of Utah’s other typical closers⁴. Gobert was next closest at 17.6%, and Ingles’ clutch usage was just 10.3% despite being the most efficient user of clutch possessions among Utah’s five most common closers. Now, he’ll be joined in those clutch situations by Conley, who for his part posted a 37.7% clutch usage last year. Both guards can benefit from sharing the load, and just like Walker and Mitchell experienced to varying results in China, they’ll have to figure out the right balance.

It is a luxury for Mitchell to have Conley and others to take the pressure off him. But it’s also a new challenge, as the 23-year-old will have to figure out (without the benefit of hindsight) when to put the pedal down and when to rely on an improved supporting cast. This will add a whole new mental component to the NBA game for Mitchell, who walked into the gym as a rookie and was essentially handed the mantle of primary scorer. In some ways, it will add complexity to a part of the game that has been pretty gloriously simple for Mitchell since he joined the Jazz. It will make the Jazz better in both the short term and the long the run, and it could turn Mitchell into a more surgical and thoughtful scorer.

But as we saw in China, he’ll have to learn to establish that sort of feel, and it will be a new and fascinating experiment for him and everybody who watches him.