Mitchell Takes Another Step As a Playoff Assassin

Donovan Mitchell’s game looks as mature as ever as the Jazz go up 2-0. (via ESPN.com)

In the fall of 2017, the Utah Jazz made a gutsy decision. A few games into their season, they turned the offense over to a late lottery rookie. Their attempts to turn complementary scorer Rodney Hood into the focal point of the offense weren’t yielding what they had hoped, and there were no other options capable of carrying that kind of possession load. Almost out of necessity, they gave Donovan Mitchell the greenest of green lights, retooling everything around the 13th pick in the draft less than a dozen games into his career.

It turns out that might have been one of the most important decisions the Jazz have made this century. Had Mitchell followed the typical developmental path of a mid-first round rookie, chances are good that he still would have blossomed eventually. Talent like this doesn’t stay hidden. But his promotion up the depth chart accelerated his progress at mastering different defensive looks. Because he has been a primary offensive threat almost since he tumbled out of the proverbial basketball womb, he’s had time to see all the different ways teams try to bog down an alpha scorer. And one by one, he’s mastered each of them.

“I’ve seen every coverage,” Mitchell explained after a 37-point performance in Game 2, his fourth straight 30-plus outburst in these playoffs. “It’s just a matter of me making the right reads.”

Now in his fourth postseason, Mitchell is a patient killer. Experience is the best teacher, and four years atop opponents’ scouting reports have given Mitchell a crash course in every defensive gambit available to his adversaries. He might have gotten there eventually either way, but the 24-year-old is undeniably ahead of schedule in terms of being able to confound even playoff defenses with precision in his read-and-react process and a special ability to impose his will and pace on a possession.

“I knew coming into the game they were going to throw different looks (at me),” he continued. “Just gotta be ready and watch the film and do what I instinctively do.”

During round one, we looked at how thoroughly Mike Conley Jr. decimated every pick-and-roll coverage the Memphis Grizzlies tried against him, surgically dicing through one scheme after another with patience, precision and smarts. Mitchell is doing the same thing right now as a lead ball handler in both pick-and-roll situations and as an iso battering ram, and it deserves similar video-room treatment.

Let’s take a look at how Mitchell is busting open anything the Clips try to slow him down.

Tale of the Tape

Before the Clippers-Jazz series started, Mitchell explained to assembled media why he may be even better suited to pick teams apart in the postseason. 

“In the playoffs, everything’s kind of slowed down,” he said, “which makes the game more tactical and more mental. It really goes down to experience and how you can slow the game down and make reads for others and for yourself.”

So far in Mitchell’s career, that checks out. His raw scoring, usage, per-possession outputs, efficiency and assist percentage all trend up in the postseason over his regular season norms. He truly plays like the best version of himself when the games matter the most.

“Now you know what you can get to, what you’re capable of, how you can get there, slowing the game down yourself. You’re seeing the game at a different pace.”

Like he does here. The Jazz run a double high stagger, which LAC can guard a number of ways. But as soon as Mitchell sees Luke Kennard jump out high to cut off the second screen, he knows he can leave Kennard in the dust by just turning downhill. Kawhi Leonard is slow getting under the first screen, and Mitchell attacks Marcus Morris Sr. anyway, whom he freezes with a second consecutive change of speed move. It’s a sweet read, and even sweeter move-within-a-move sequence:

Even more straightforward on this next one. Against the switching defense, Mitchell catches Kennard waiting for the switch before he has even used the screen. So he simply spins away from the pick into empty space. Kennard makes a valiant effort to recover and tries to use his body to channel Mitchell into the help, but his momentum makes it too easy for Mitchell to just change directions and keep it a 1-on-1 play. Kennard fouls.

Still in Game 1, he manipulates the switching defense to get the matchup he wants. Then when he sees Kawhi coming for a preemptive trap, he simply escapes it by dribbling the other way. Kawhi winds up guarding nobody, and Mitchell beats Kennard without a pick. So by the time he gatheres, Mitchell has plenty of options — including scoring easily when the weakside help is late.

Now to Game 2, the Clippers try covering this pick-and-roll with the big dropped. But Don just toys with Kawhi — with KAWHI FLIPPING LEONARD! — by unleashing two change-of-speed moves. First he slows down around the pick to lock Leonard on his backside. Then just when Leonard things he might be able to recover, Mitchell throws on the burners to zip right past him and a very stationary Ivica Zubac. This is just an assassin at work. Against a 6-time All-Defensive Team selection.

Or watch this trio of plays where he messes with Paul George (4-time all-defense himself), first by dancing him into screens with herky-jerky moves, and then catching him at a bad angle on a cross-court catch.

Lillard-esque:

By the second half, he had the Clippers so shook that they were just throwing extra bodies at him. Ironically, that may have helped him at a point in the game when his mobility looked off, because it meant he could wait for double- and triple-teams and then whip the ball to the consequently open man without having to create by moving his feet.

Just play after play of Mitchell making the right basketball plays, and manipulating the defense with his elite toolkit of moves.

Frankly, it’s fair to ask if his combination of usage, guile, efficiency and raw numbers has moved him up a link or two on the NBA’s food chain. That seems crazy to ask about a player who already had multiple 50-point games in last year’s playoffs, but the cerebral, patient nature of his game this time around makes him look like a predator on the level of the most historically elite scoring guards in the playoffs. In a series with Leonard and George, Mitchell has been the best player on the court in each of the first two games, by a fairly significant margin. His ability to carve up and exploit every single scheme makes him look like like Dwyane Wade or Damian Lillard type force, except that he’s scoring at a completely different rate than they did this early in their careers. 

It’s just all coming together for this impressive youngster, and for a team that’s undefeated the postseason when Mitchell has the #45 on his back.

Injury Whoa?

When Mitchell finally did slow down his torrid scoring pace midway through Game 2, it may have had less to do with a specific opponent scheme and more to do with what appeared to be some kind of leg tweak.

Mitchell has been coy about the exact nature of the injury, but there was an undeniable change in aggressiveness that coincided roughly with a late first-half play in which Mitchell’s right leg slid out in front of him on a jab step move. He immediately winced and got rid of the ball, and from that point forward his game changed noticeably. He rarely drove in the second half, and by late in the game he mostly stayed upright instead of getting down in a stance in a way that might have put more pressure on whatever joint or tendon may have been bothering him. After going 3-for-5 in the restricted area in the first half, he took just two attempts there (making one) after the break. When he did drive late, he mostly didn’t have the force to get both feet in the paint, largely staying in the “slot” area running down the side of the lane.

At roughly the same point in the game, the Clippers shifted to a zone defense as their primary method of gumming up the prolific Jazz offense. The idea behind the zone was to make it harder for Mitchell and other Jazz ball handlers to pierce the defense. It appeared to work, but it’s hard to attribute exactly how much of that came down to the surprise appearance of the zone defense and how much of it was tied to Mitchell’s apparent discomfort.

The All-Star guard quickly shut down multiple postgame queries into his health status. That’s encouraging for Utah, because the complexion of the series would change if Mitchell had to sit. The Jazz managed a 13-6 record without him in the regular season. But playoff odds go up significantly when you have the type of unschemable scorer Mitchell is becoming. There’s a general exasperation in the way the Clippers were peppered with questions about dealing with the dynamic scorer after Thursday’s loss. The Jazz would rather not let the Clippers off the hook when it comes to figuring out the answer to the most perplexing question in the series: can L.A. stop Mitchell without surrendering a crapload of threes and dunks to everybody else.

Fortunately for the Jazz, it sounds like they won’t have to head down that path for now. He swears he’s fine. But it’s worth keeping an eye on his mobility and explosiveness early in Game 3.

Clippers’ Options

If Mitchell is healthy, then the Clippers are still stuck with the question of how to crawl out of an 0-2 series deficit when they’re facing a guy who has dropped 82 points on them in 76 minutes. What adjustments are left for them to try?

From a lineup standpoint, they’ve thrown the kitchen sink at Utah. Ty Lue has tinkered non-stop throughout the series. His rotation has changed in each of the four halves his team has played against Utah, and not just in little subtle ways. Players have appeared out of nowhere, played big roles, and then disappeared again. They’ve toggled not just between schemes but identities. The rotation and game plan have been unsettled, to say the least.

Among the things that have worked so far, the Clips have actually gotten decent results playing witha  traditional big. They are +9.3 per 100 so far in DeMarcus Cousins’ minutes, and they’re exactly even when Zubac is at center.

When those two are out, the various smallball combinations Lue has trotted out are a combined -9.8. Those lineups, a Clipper strength in the regular season, can’t continue to be a liability if L.A. hopes to make this series competitive. Those units didn’t guard well in the regular season, either, but they were so unstoppable offensively that they still played winning basketball overall. Right now, the no-center lineups are scoring at just an average rate while allowing Utah to lay 123.5 points per 100 on them.

The Clippers either need to get the small lineups clicking again, or commit to more minutes with a traditional roll man. In the second half of Game 2, they went away from Cousins and Zubac almost altogether.

Part of the reason they went away from the bigs is because they randomly happened on something else that was working: a zone defense.

Again, it’s hard to say how much of Utah’s offensive stagnation boiled down to Mitchell’s sudden aversion to driving after some slips and falls. The Jazz mostly responded to the zone by passing around it passively until someone (usually Jordan Clarkson) finally just tried to iso their way through it.

With better preparation, it’s hard to imagine they can’t come up with a better approach. Utah literally led the league at scoring against zone defenses in the regular season, per stats dug up by Ben Dowsett. The Jazz will eventually solve this Clipper zone. Joe Ingles reminded reporters on Thursday that it’s not uncommon for the Jazz to struggle when an opponent first rolls out a new defensive approach, only to adjust quickly and figure it out.

In other words, the zone may not be LAC’s best long-term bet in this series.

So what’s left to try? They could look at specific defensive assignments. Ten different Clippers have ended at least one possession as Mitchell’s nearest defender, and he has scored on everybody except for Rajon Rondo and Patrick Beverley. He is a combined 0/4 with 3 TOs on plays where the NBA’s tracking cameras deemed one of those two his primary defender at the end of the play. So it’s at least something for Lue to consider giving an extended look.

The other Clipper option, of course: just play better. If smallball lineups and switching defenses aren’t working, sometimes the right answer isn’t to run away from a strategy, but rather to execute it better until it works. Morris isn’t going to keep shooting 7% from three all series, and for that matter the Clips as a whole won’t keep shooting 34% on catch-and-shoot threes. At some point if they stick with it and play harder, some of what made their best lineups so lethal in the regular season will start working for them, to one degree or another.

Zooming out

The Jazz are up 2-0, but their wins have come by an average margin of 4.5. From a macro level, both teams have things they can justifiably be happy with after two games.

An optimistic Jazz fan could point to the way the Jazz dominated the second half of Game 1 while they erased a 13-point lead at home, or the 21-point cushion they built in Game 2. The 21 straight misses that put them in a double-digit hole were flukey, one could argue, and the Clippers’ Thursday comeback coincided with Mitchell getting banged up. All fair.

Conversely, a bullish Clipper fan is likely encouraged by how discombobulated LAC made Utah look early in Game 1, and feels real momentum after a second half surge that almost got the Clippers a Game 2 win. It took a historic performance from Mitchell to bring Utah back on Tuesday, they’d say, and the team missed an uncharacteristic number of open looks to fall behind before the furious comeback on Thursday.

But that’s just it: all 96 minutes matter. It all counts, not just the minutes that make one fan or the other feel good about their team’s chances. At the end of the series, the league isn’t going to convene a special panel to determine which minutes count towards the series outcome. Four wins means you advance, four losses means you clean out your locker and gas up the fishing boat. Period.

Looking at all 96 minutes so far, the Clippers have thrown real punches, and some of them have landed. To insist otherwise in a series with a total point differential of nine points is to deny reality. Utah’s margin for error in Games 1 & 2 wasn’t massive, and now the series shifts back to the Staples Center. The Jazz are not out of the woods yet. But 2-0 is 2-0.

And Donovan Mitchell is playing the best basketball of his life, ascending to rarefied air way ahead of schedule.