Years before ever stepping onto an NBA court, a teenage Donovan Mitchell is hard at work practicing a set he can’t quite perfect. It’s complex and challenging, with multiple problem areas; Mitchell finally nails one element, only to be roadblocked by another. He works through frustration, keeping at it until it feels perfect – the life of an aspiring professional on display even at a young age.
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Only here’s the thing: He’s not on the basketball court, or even on a baseball diamond where he first found his love for sports.
“Red drum set,” Mitchell says. “In the basement, banging the hell out of the drums.”
Mitchell first began playing the drums in fourth grade, and it quickly became a second love. The decision to get started came about naturally – students in his class were each required to choose an artistic endeavor to pursue, and his mother Nicole reminded him of an early childhood habit that made the decision easy. “Turns out, I was banging pots and all that stuff at a young age, so I guess it was my natural calling,” he says.
As he became more comfortable, the drums turned into a creative outlet. He honed his fundamentals with regular lessons (“Mrs. Lewis – give her a shoutout.”) and appearances in jazz band, then he found ways to combine those with some of his favorite popular music.
Before long, percussion joined sport as a way to cultivate personal improvement. He’d spend hours in that basement, refining and adjusting. One nagging area was the bass pedal – Mitchell couldn’t afford the “double-pedal” piece that allows the drummer to strike the bass faster by using both feet, so he simply had to work harder with one.
“Repetition is the biggest thing. Being perfect,” Mitchell recalls. “The mistakes that you make, being able to correct them on the next try.”
He doesn’t have the time to drum regularly anymore; he’s too busy being one of the NBA’s most dynamic young players, a Rookie of the Year candidate and the centerpiece of a Utah Jazz team that will make the playoffs despite losing All-Star Gordon Hayward in the offseason. When he picks up the sticks, though, like he did over All-Star weekend for a quick showcase, it’s like he never put them down. And whether he knew it or not, Mitchell’s other childhood passion fed his first.
In October 2017, Mitchell was in the midst of his first NBA preseason action for the Jazz. He’d already developed a close relationship with Jazz assistant coach Johnnie Bryant, his daily film and training partner. Mitchell had impressed Bryant and other members of the staff when they first met back in July – he quickly picked up several advanced moves Bryant had given him in an early film session and was using them days later in Summer League despite the team’s expectation they’d be a yearlong project. With that in mind, Bryant was already looking for new ways to challenge Mitchell.
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“I showed him (a play), we call it a drop dribble Euro,” Bryant says. “If the ball is in your left hand, you drop it in between your body like you’re crossing over going to your right, but then you pick it up and Euro-step and come right back to the left side of your body and finish. We worked on that on a Friday, and then we played the Phoenix Suns in the preseason.”
Once again, this was meant to be another piece of the long-term puzzle with Mitchell. But just as if he was sight-reading a piece of music, Mitchell digested the move – one he’d never done before in a game – and pulled it out against the very same Suns.
“The opportunity presented itself, and he came down on Tyson Chandler, and he used the move,” Bryant says.
“The thing with him – he’s not afraid to apply whatever he’s worked on into the game,” Bryant adds. “A lot of people, just naturally, if you’re not good at something, you don’t want to look bad – especially professional athletes, right? For him, he’s not afraid to go out there and try it.”
The Jazz knew they had a high-aptitude kid long before that moment. But this was their first in-person look at an accelerated developmental curve that few young players possess.
“When he did that, that’s when I was like, ‘Okay. He’s not afraid to try it, and he’s not afraid to fail,’” Bryant says.
The link between learning music and brain development is well established, especially among those who begin playing at an early age. Playing music is linked with a larger memory capacity and, over time, musicians develop a connection between brain circuits that otherwise wouldn’t link. This leads to less reliance on working memory – the actual act of having to “think” through a given motion or action – and increases the reflexive connectivity of the brain. Think of it as training the brain to improvise.
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“In many ways, music and athletics are unsolvable puzzles,” says Scott Goldman, director of performance psychology at the University of Michigan and for the NFL’s Miami Dolphins. “We can use a wide variety of cognitive abilities to get as close as possible to that answer.”
When Mitchell went to work perfecting a given piece of music, he was building up his working memory and improving his brain’s ability to function on recall and reflex. He was also increasing his ability to absorb information from more than one sense at a time, along with his brain’s ability to process that information quickly.
“As a point guard, I think it helps,” Mitchell says. “Being able to know, ‘Alright, this is here, this is there, this is there.’” That kind of spatial recognition is vital for NBA distributors, and Mitchell was honing it before he ever knew he wanted to play basketball for a living.
And as he grew older and pro basketball became more of a reality, that early development continued to show through. So, too, did a vital flip side of his musical training.
As Goldman explains it, there are two necessary elements that define success when it comes to the processing of information in the brain: The ability to process the information, which varies between individuals, and the desire to process that information, which can vary even more. The most intelligent, high-aptitude learner on earth will still be deficient in a given area if they have no interest in the subject.
Agent Ty Sullivan of CAA Sports recalls a long drive back from one of Mitchell’s pre-draft workouts, a time when nearly every other prospect he’d worked with would have been on their social media accounts, sleeping or otherwise decompressing.
Mitchell? He was watching NBA film.
“He was staring at what Russ (Westbrook) did last night,” Sullivan says. “Not looking at it in awe, looking at it like: ‘I want to do that.’”
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Mitchell drew rave reviews from multiple front offices and scored extremely well on various aptitude tests. He was surprised when he wasn’t selected 12th by the Detroit Pistons after showing off his film acumen in an interview. “I thought I aced the test,” he says.
Instead, the Jazz traded up with Denver to select Mitchell one spot later. Any minor doubts the organization had about him were quickly erased, as they realized his ability to process information and implement new techniques.
They started with foundational physical skills, namely Mitchell’s jumping habits. Scouting reports were full of references to him as a “two-footed jumper” who needed time and set up to achieve maximum burst, and that inability to comfortably leap off one foot would limit his playmaking ability in the NBA.
“I told him, ‘Hey, in this league, you have to learn how to play off one foot,’” Bryant says.
Re-training that kind of reflex isn’t easy. Mitchell was finishing shots within five feet of the hoop at just a 45 percent rate through his first handful of NBA games, regularly struggling when he instinctively reverted back to the two-foot jump.
Then, all of a sudden, it clicked. From the beginning of December on, Mitchell finished those same shots at over 61 percent – better than James Harden’s accuracy at the rim over that same span, and an elite figure for a smaller guard. Where even just weeks prior he had looked uncomfortable jumping off one foot or hesitant to do it at all, now it looked like second nature.
Like plenty of younger guys, Mitchell entered the NBA heavily reliant on his right hand. Bryant set to work changing that as well. He’d give Donovan regular challenges involving the use of his left hand, only to see Mitchell pulling them out in a game a day or two later.
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“Going against Rudy (Gobert in practice) helped me a lot,” Mitchell says. “Just being able to finish through contact. Getting the defender off-balance allows you to finish over those taller guys.”
Another area Bryant and the Jazz identified early was the in-between game – floaters, to the uninitiated. Mitchell never really needed that in his bag at Louisville; his speed and hops got him to the rim easily, and he had a green light to shoot jumpers with few other true creators on the roster.
In the NBA, good defenses will wall off those easier looks and make you take tougher ones, especially as time winds down on the shot clock. And as it quickly became clear that Mitchell was Utah’s best option to create his own shot in these scenarios (he’s taken 120 shots in the final four seconds of the shot clock this year, more than double the total of second-place Joe Ingles), he needed better counters.
There was no big physical hurdle here, no major tweak. Simply put, a guy who had very rarely taken these shots in game scenarios during his career had to get more comfortable doing it and quickly.
“Just trusting it and having faith in it,” Mitchell says. “That’s all it is – repetition. It’s something new to me.”
You could see that in Mitchell’s floater game early in the season. They were something of a last resort at times, with no organic flow leading into them:
Before long, though, a little familiarity made all the difference. Mitchell made barely a quarter of his floaters through the month of November, but then he jumped up into the mid-40s percentage wise for the next month and a half. It’s not his most efficient form of offense, but he can pull it out more naturally when needed, part of his growing arsenal of combo moves.
“Especially in-season, it’s just one of those things where you focus on the fundamentals of it, and then you apply it in game situations,” Bryant says.
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As teams caught on to Utah’s new top offensive threat and devoted more resources to stopping him, it became time to get others involved. Long-term and short-term injuries to other lead guards on the roster put a bigger playmaking load in Mitchell’s hands than most expected, a tall task for a guy who averaged just 2.2 assists per game at Louisville.
Basketball’s pick-and-roll ball-handler role is perhaps the closest approximation to an NFL quarterback; multiple reads are necessary all within a span of milliseconds, each layered on top of a pre-existing knowledge base regarding how the opponent defends detailed actions. A single step in one direction or another, or even a slight head fake, can change the entire complexion of the set for all 10 guys on the floor.
Young ball-handlers often get tunnel vision, and Mitchell was no exception early on. Per Second Spectrum tracking data, he passed the ball on just 17.5 percent of his drives during the early parts of the year in October – that’d be the lowest rate in the entire league among guards who drive regularly for the full season.
Since then? He’s up near 30 percent. That’s not a high rate league-wide, but when you consider his progress on floaters and rim finishes, you can understand why he’s not looking to pass quite as often as other guys. So what changed?
“Figuring out what the defensive coverage is, and knowing it from team to team,” Mitchell says. “Just understanding that guys are going to start coming in the paint on me a bit more in pick-and-roll. Not really staring at the pick-and-roll – staring at the guy behind the pick-and-roll.”
In an early December game against New Orleans, one where he’d finish with 41 points, Mitchell was in the midst of leading a Jazz comeback from a double-digit deficit. He’d spent much of the second half ripping up the Pelicans’ pick-and-roll defense. With star Anthony Davis out to injury for the entire fourth quarter, Mitchell repeatedly abused the slower DeMarcus Cousins and got to the rim with ease.
With Utah down one on a critical late possession, the Jazz put Cousins in pick-and-roll with Mitchell yet again.
This may not look complex. For the best of them, it isn’t. For a rookie in his third month in the league, in the midst of a 40-point scoring explosion? It is remarkable.
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Mitchell threw about 30 passes per night in his first month in the league, per Second Spectrum data, generating just over four potential assists per game. Since then, he’s throwing over 40 passes every game and has almost doubled his assist chances.
As the year has gone on, head coach Quin Snyder, Bryant and the Jazz staff have kept shoveling new material (sheet music?) under Mitchell’s nose. Mitchell and Bryant watch around 30 to 35 clips from each game he plays in – roughly half on the offensive end, and half on the defensive end. The latter side doesn’t show up in many highlights, but it’s been a constant source of development nonetheless.
“That’s equally important as him playing off one foot or his finishing and things like that,” Bryant says. “Whether it’s his stance on the weak side, having vision of the basketball, whether it’s him getting over pick-and-roll screens, whether it’s him boxing out or him rotating, any type of dynamic. We really target those areas just as much as we target his offensive side of the ball.”
Through it all, there’s a consistent nod to the unique nature of Mitchell’s growth mindset – and the speed at which he picks stuff up. Those dealing with Mitchell behind the scenes can count on one hand the number of young players they’ve seen who can process information and implement new techniques so quickly.
“When we put ourselves out of our comfort zones, that forces our brains to tap into our intelligence to continually solve novel tasks,” Goldman says. “When you place people in foreign and uncomfortable scenarios that tap into their cognitive ability, that’s where growth comes from.”
Ask Mitchell or anyone close to him, and they’ll tell you this is only the beginning. He hasn’t even had a full offseason with teammates yet; the Jazz emphasize in-season development perhaps more than any other team in the league, but there’s just more time during the summers to focus on skill development.
“I told him: ‘The cup is full.’” Snyder says of a recent message he gave his young charge. “Gotta empty it out, and keep trying to absorb more.’”
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