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What’s with the hate for Donovan Mitchell?

I’m 100% certain that the end of the honeymoon period with Donovan started for non basketball reasons- when he became vocal about racial injustice as well as pushing for critical race theory to be taught in Utah schools. When all of that was happening, I remember reading tweet after tweet from Jazz fans that were beyond cringe worthy. If we’re going to be completely honest with ourselves, there’s a large segment of fans that still have the “Shut up and dribble” mentality. While that’s certainly not exclusive to Jazz fans, I think it’s more prevalent in our fanbase than we’d probably like to admit.

So that got the snowball rolling and then the Rudy-v-Donovan **** started happening and he certainly did not do himself any favors with how he handled that situation. I’ve definitely been concerned with Donovan for these last two seasons, but I’m not willing to label him a quitter, locker room cancer, etc. quite yet because we as fans have ZERO idea about what was really going on behind closed doors. We’ve started to get some bread crumbs here and there, but it still comes up massively short for painting the whole picture.

What we do know at this point is that the Jazz were toxic. Guys didn’t enjoy playing with each other and it sounds like Quin lost the whole locker room. I really have no idea how much of that should be put on Donovan’s shoulders, but some Jazz fans have decided that they’ve heard enough info and that Don is a problem.

Maybe I’m giving Donovan too much of a pass, but I keep thinking back to the playoff series vs OKC in 2018. That was a really good Thunder team and a very young Donovan Mitchell put that Jazz team on his shoulders and sent an OKC team who’s starting lineup was: Paul George/Westbrook/Carmello/Jerami Grant/S. Adams home in 6. I believe THAT guy is still in there somewhere. The kid is 25 years old, he’s made some mistakes, and he’s still figuring things out, but I think it’s worth trying to see if we can get that Donovan Mitchell back, because the guy I saw in that series was absolutely a franchise cornerstone worth building around.
 
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Perhaps we've never seen a team in modern NBA history build around a super max player that can't score outside of 3 feet. Danny Ainge understands how to build a winner, he knew Rudy wasn't the guy you build around, keep crying.
I don’t disagree with this. Your prior comment is still wrong though. Learn about a thing called “nuance”, please.
 
I quite literally stopped caring about their feelings or opinions when they started hating on him because he was hanging out with people. You want to hate on effort or whatever, I get that. But chilling with LeBron or Bam in the friggin off season? Yeah, that's a stone skip too far.

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I quite literally stopped caring about their feelings or opinions when they started hating on him because he was hanging out with people. You want to hate on effort or whatever, I get that. But chilling with LeBron or Bam in the friggin off season? Yeah, that's a stone skip too far.

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You posted this in response to nothing. Just to continue to make this discussion more toxic.
 
You posted this in response to nothing. Just to continue to make this discussion more toxic.
I posted in response to the OP and thread title. But thank you for your concern. Like I said, folks want to bag on Don's effort or whatever, that's fine. I 100% get that because there are legitimate gripes there. But *****ing about who he's hanging out with after a long season is a bridge too far. And yes, I've seen this sh*t all over Twitter and message boards, including here. That's just *****ing to *****. People like that really need help.
 
Is he wrong?

We made a dumb *** trade for Mike Conley and Quin built a system that simply does not work in the postseason. Every defender on our team turns into traffic cones sending opponents to the Rudy zone.

But Donovan is the one who takes all the blame. Out there putting up 25 5 and 5 and trying more than he ever gets credit for. He never throws a teammate under the bus. Great guy off the court.

But yall hate him, and most on here don't even have the guts to say why.



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Why didn't they dislike Rudy when he was significantly worse offensively than Don is defensively?
I'll take a stab at this one. because it was a simple fact that rudy was limited from a skills standpoint offensively. it wasn't an issue of effort. it wasn't an issue of improvement - as limited as he was he got better offensively throughout his career.

in the case of dm, it's an issue of effort. he has the physical attributes, athleticism, etc to be a very good guard defender. but he doesn't give a ****. he doesn't try and on top of that he's gotten gradually worse as his career has progressed. fans have a hard time with players who don't give effort defensively and who don't work hard to improve.

yet, all that said, i don't hate mitchell either - i just think it would benefit the jazz to trade him (especially following the rudy trade) for another great haul of players/picks if they can get something done.
 
So here are some other thoughts about why some, potentially, “hate” on Donovan. Again, I think this is a small subset of a subset of that feel this way. My guess is that most Jazz fans think Don is the coolest. But anywaysss…

(1) there was a honeymoon period where Don was all into Utah and all into being in Utah. Crashing BBQs, hitting up local college football games, opening a Stance store, etc. Like all honeymoon periods, it just kinda organically ended. When all of this stopped happening, it triggered that insecure, paranoid part of every Utah sports fan’s brain that’s conditioned to think “everyone hates Utah and no one wants to be here.” So rather than enjoy Donovan, a part of Utah collectively turned on Donovan to make him the villain to make it less painful if/when he left.
(2) the alternative and simplest explanation is that the on-court performance of the team has not lived up to expectations, which always leads to situations like this.

It’s probably some combination of these.
 
I'll take a stab at this one. because it was a simple fact that rudy was limited from a skills standpoint offensively. it wasn't an issue of effort. it wasn't an issue of improvement - as limited as he was he got better offensively throughout his career.

in the case of dm, it's an issue of effort. he has the physical attributes, athleticism, etc to be a very good guard defender. but he doesn't give a ****. he doesn't try and on top of that he's gotten gradually worse as his career has progressed. fans have a hard time with players who don't give effort defensively and who don't work hard to improve.

yet, all that said, i don't hate mitchell either - i just think it would benefit the jazz to trade him (especially following the rudy trade) for another great haul of players/picks if they can get something done.
Rudy's lack of development was definitely an effort issue.
 
Rudy's lack of development was definitely an effort issue.
but he did develop. dude just had the best offensive season of his career this last year. and whether you think he didn't develop enough and that lack of development was an issue of effort, to answer the question you posed, i don't think most fans see it that way. i think most fans see rudy as a guy who put in the work and played hard most of the time.
 
I'm so tired of Rudy vs Don arguments.

Don tries on defense, but not all the time. That's BS and he should improve on that.

Rudy has zero offensive abilities with the ball in his hands outside of 3 feet. I don't know if that's from effort or the inability to have the coordination to do much more.

Don can and should address his issues, and I believe he will with the new coach in a system that makes sense like Rudy Gay alluded to. Rudy is in Minnesota.
 
Does anyone know what this is directly a response to? If it is really a dig at the organization then to me it is the strongest evidence he is actively being shopped and he knows it. If not, then why bite the hand that feeds you? Makes no sense.

If he’s talking about the fans then he is just looking for excuses to justify wanting out. You can go look at any other players Twitter and you will find the same stuff.
 
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