Bleacher Reports puts Donovan Mitchell in rarified air with the NBA’s all-time greats originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
While Donovan Mitchell’s time with the Utah Jazz and Cleveland Cavaliers hasn’t netted the All-NBA guard a lot of success in the postseason, it’s hard to deny that his career has been anything but exceptional. The former 13th overall pick in the 2017 NBA Draft has been one of the best all-around players in the NBA for nearly a decade, especially on the offensive end.
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Coming into the league as a rookie, Mitchell has scored at least 20 points per season for his career in each and every season so far. He’s currently averaging 28.0 points for the 2025-2026 season and has a career average of 25.0 points per game. He’s been named to seven All-Star teams, two All-NBA teams, and has been a Top 6 in the Most Valuable Player of the Year voting twice.
He’s been one of the best players in the league since he arrived. Yet,according to Bleacher Report, he’s been more than just one of the best players of his generation.
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In a recent write-up, Bleacher Report’s writer Andy Bailey named Mitchell as one of the 15 best pure scorers in NBA history. Bailey placed Mitchell at 14th, on a list that includes Kevin Durant, Michael Jordan, Steph Curry, George Garvin, and others. The whole list is a bit shocking, as names like Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic, and Luka Doncic are on the list, but guys like Allen Iverson, Dirk Nowitzki, and Carmelo Anthony aren’t. Heck, even a universally agreed-upon great scorer like Pete Maravich didn’t make the list.
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In fact, the list of 15 contains 10 current NBA players. Such a move makes you think that this may be a list of recency bias. After all, Bailey came up with his own weighted evaluation for the list. The list looks at specific efficiency averages, which seem fine on paper, but those numbers don’t hold up in a vacuum. No real weight was given to the extreme change in rules for the NBA’s defenses from generation to generation. This makes it hard for a guy like Maravich to make the list, as defenses were allowed to do more to prevent scoring in the 1970s, not to mention the lack of a three-point line during a majority of his career.
He’s not as successful as a guy like Steph Curry because he didn’t have the same rules.
Too many rules have changed from the 1970s to the 2020s for a fair, blind, mathematically driven list to be properly conceived from pure stats. Because the change of defensive rules is essentially ignored, it’s impossible to say with any certainty if Mitchell is, in fact, a Top 15 pure scorer all-time.
He’s a true talent regardless, but a Top 15 scorer? It’s impossible to say by the metrics we’re given.
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Still, Mitchell has been incredible in his career. Making it even more impressive is that his success largely came out of nowhere. No one really expected the 13th overall pick to become one of, if not the best player in his draft class, but here we are, saying he’s become just that. The Bleacher Report Top 15 may not carry a lot of weight, but his career is without a doubt impressive regardless.
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