CLEVELAND — Donovan Mitchell carried a heavy burden last season, the weight of expectations and speculation about his future combining to make every move on and off the court a challenge.
It's been lifted. The All-Star guard is freed.
“I can come in here now and breathe,” Mitchell said Monday in his first public comments since signing a three-year, $150.3 million contract extension with the Cavaliers in July.
All those rumors about him wanting to play in New York are over. All the talk about him testing the market as a free agent silenced. All the social media theories have ceased. Mitchell isn't going anywhere for some time.
Cleveland has become home. Why?
“Why not?" he said. “I love it here.”
Mitchell, who was traded from Utah to the Cavs in 2022, felt an immediate connection with the city from the moment he arrived. He likes the pace and the people. He can handle the harsh winters, joking “I dress better in the cold," and said in January he concluded that it was the best place for him to continue his career.
With a strong core of players, the Cavs have something good going, and Mitchell, one of the game's best two-way guards who was viewed as the final piece to return the club to NBA title contention, only makes it better.
The 28-year-old spent much of last season dealing with questions about his commitment to the Cavs, who overcame numerous injuries and advanced to the Eastern Conference semifinals before losing to eventual champion Boston.
Often awkward, it was almost a daily dance. Will he sign? Will he leave? And while Mitchell seemed to handle it well, he admitted it became exhausting — for everyone.
“This is my first media day in probably three years where I don’t have people asking me what does it take for me to stay somewhere?” Mitchell said, speaking to a large media contingent inside Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. “Don’t understate how it becomes a lot. Not even just (for) myself but my teammates and to answer these questions because that’s a real thing, too.”
The “looming cloud,” as he called it, has dissipated.
“It’s refreshing,” he said. “I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be part of this group now. The biggest thing is now that I’ve signed the contract and we’re here and now there’s an expectation. It’s not like we just signed and that’s the end goal. We’re happy, whatever. There’s an expectation for us to do big things. That’s kind of where my mind is at.”
Physically, Mitchell is in a good place as well. A nagging knee injury impacted him down the stretch of the regular season, and he battled a calf injury throughout the postseason before finally succumbing and sitting out Cleveland's final two games against the Celtics.
Now entering his eighth season, Mitchell has learned what works and what doesn't. He's paying more attention to nutrition, hiring a full-time chef who travels with him. He waited longer than usual before beginning his offseason conditioning program, giving his body more time to recover.
“I’m not 22 anymore,” he said. “But I’m not 33.”
The Cavs are running it back this season with the same roster, but a new coach in Kenny Atkinson, hired to replace J.B. Bickerstaff. It's early but Mitchell has already bonded with Atkinson, who made it a point to visit his top player this summer.
That is, after he got done messaging him in the middle of the night from the Olympics. Atkinson was an assistant on France's national team but that didn't preclude him from touching base with Mitchell and the rest of Cleveland's players.
“It’s like 4 a.m. and he’s texting me how to slip out of screens and back screens and different actions and different things,” Mitchell said, smiling. “So, I can’t complain when you have a coach that’s doing that for sure. So for him to do that, I think it shows how much he cares, the passion behind it.”
NOTES: Cavs center Jarrett Allen disclosed it took more than two weeks after the season to fully recover from a broken rib that knocked him out of Cleveland's final eight games. The team's vagueness about Allen's injury led to criticism. “That definitely contributed to the skepticism of the injury,” Allen said. “Now that it’s out, looking at the CT scan, you could still see the piece of bone that’s still floating in my body somewhere. It was definitely a worse injury than people thought."
