You are sort of right but missing the reason.
Edwards has gone through seasons where his team was bad and Donovan never has.
I think the team just took Rudy for granted and started buying into the national media narratives about how you can't win past the first round with Gobert. Quin took Rudy for granted and exploited his lack of need for the ball by not creating a bigger emphasis on finding him when he was open under the rim. Don saw himself put up massive numbers and still lose, which probably led him to believe he needed more offensive help rather than helping Gobert defensively. DL took Rudy for granted and decided we had to maximize the shooting around him instead of helping him defensively.
Edwards doesn't have that (even triply so for KAT). He came into a bad organization known for losing and he wasn't granted immediate success. The team made a huge commitment to making Gobert work instead of taking him for granted.
I also think Edwards is just flat out better than Mitchell on both ends and being better and having more size is the most important thing in the nba.
I agree with most of this but in particular the bolded. I think most people bought into this, especially coupled with a misdiagnosis of what the actual problem was. It's just that certain narratives become overwhelming for people. You can resist the tide only so long. One or two people or a small group consistently saying things is one thing, but when everyone in unison keeps saying the same thing, it just ends up being too hard to swim upstream and you give in. I'm not sure I agree on Don thinking he needed more offensive help. Perhaps indirectly but even Don saw the "historic" numbers for the offense floated around and he felt this was happening despite Rudy and his personal issues with him skewed his feelings about what he brought on the offensive end, without recognizing that he was one of the largest beneficiaries offensively of what Rudy did, not to mention the fact that Rudy's defense allowed the team to be where it was to have its offense even be relevant. But Donovan came in to this situation. The only "suck" he experienced was his rookie year when Rudy was out, and not until Rudy returned did we come back. Despite Donovan's lack of acknowledging this, I believe deep down there was some insecurity and he wanted to prove that this success was more a result of him and not this unseen Gobert force. Even though that wasn't the popular narrative, there was a pretty good mass of knowledgeable people that credited Rudy for this and I believe the lack of unanimity of it being "Don's team" was at least a partial factor in his underlying resentment. That and when Rudy would call things out, though most people couldn't see the reality of the situation, I believe Donovan to some extent did and he attempted to suppress it and try to overcompensate. When the failures came, it was easier to feel it was on Gobert and the system, and after he built up this brand in his rookie year of being this humble, teachable kid who wants to work really hard and continue to self-improve, he faced the reality that his pathway forward wasn't aligned with that image so he embraced the things in front of him that made it easier and/or more justifiable to fall out of love with Utah.
But I lay a lot of the failure at the feet of DL and Quin. Ultimately they are the ones in the situation to see this problem and intervene or at least mitigating some of these issues. We didn't even need gigantic course corrections from either party to avoid half our problems. DL needed to just do a couple small things around the edges. Quin needed to adjust his strategy of baiting the offense into looks that are low-efficiency on a spreadsheet (when those "low-efficiency" numbers have been collected in the setting of a standard defense attempting to defend them... and are not reflective of what those numbers look like when the defense is completely surrendering those looks). The emphasis needed to be staying with your guy on the perimeter. I do not believe at all that you need a bunch of wirey, dirty athletic dudes to be able to accomplish this. You can do it with average and below average defenders. It just became conditioned strategy to let people blow by you because "hey, run them right into Rudy, our secret weapon."
Just look at our pre-Mike and pre-Bojan teams that were good on defense. Who were the great defenders we had? 34 year old Thabo Sefolosha? Jae Crowder? Thabo was a good defender but was old and played 21 mpg the first season and 12 mpg the second. Jae Crowder had a reputation as a defender but wasn't great. It was more just that these guys (everyone) played defense where the expectation was to stay in front of your man. When we swapped Jae for Bojan and Ricky for Mike, it wasn't the defensive capabilities that significantly dropped, it was the emphasis of the defense where Quin just said let everyone shoot open from mid-range or meet Gobert at the rim.
