Richard Jefferson clarified his take that if Donovan Mitchell were on last season’s iteration of the Boston Celtics instead of Jayson Tatum, the Celtics still would have been crowned as the 2024 NBA champions.
This is not a knock on JT,.. I believe there are 5-6 PLAYERS ON this level. Ant, Shai, Donovan, Luka. I believe if you put these top 10 players on the Celtics they would still be dominant. This is a 1. Donavon is on that level and 2. Celtics are that loaded. https://t.co/HNZVhXkDNz
— Richard Jefferson (@Rjeff24) September 26, 2024
On top of the notion that the Celtics would still have won the title with Mitchell instead of Tatum, Jefferson also claimed that the former would have averaged 25 points per game with Boston. In Jefferson’s defense, Mitchell has averaged 24.8 points for his career and scored 26.6 points per contest during the 2023-24 regular season.
But it’s difficult to pinpoint an area of the game that doesn’t involve scoring the ball where Mitchell measures up to Tatum. To start, Tatum is a voracious rebounder, as he averaged 8.1 last season and 9.7 per game during the Celtics’ title run. Mitchell averaged a career-high 5.1 rebounds a season ago, which is lower than Tatum’s career average of 7.2 boards per contest.
Mitchell’s defensive chops also leave a lot to be desired. He did average an impressive amount of steals per game (1.8) in his second season in Cleveland, but that number isn’t a good indicator of his impact — or lack thereof — on that end of the court.
Tatum, on the other hand, is a very serviceable defensive player. He also arguably has more advantageous physical features than Mitchell does, as the former stands at 6-foot-8 and weighs in at 209 pounds. Surprisingly, Mitchell — who is 215 pounds — weighs more than Tatum does despite the fact that he is several inches shorter.
Mitchell’s Cavaliers were one of the four teams that Tatum’s Celtics had to go through on their path to the title. The second-round matchup was knotted at one game apiece after the teams split the first two games of the best-of-seven series in Boston, but the Celtics dominated the remainder of the series.
The Celtics won Games 3, 4 and 5 — with two of those victories coming by double digits — in order to eliminate the Cavaliers in a gentleman’s sweep. It is worth noting that Mitchell played in only three of the five games of the series due to a calf injury, however.
