The former 5-star recruit and Duke transfer landed in Como and set a big early standard.
We’ve reached the end of the reviews and it’s only mid-July!
There were some indications of Mark Mitchell entering the transfer portal early in the season. Duke had signed Cooper Flagg who played the same position, and Mitchell hadn’t popped despite playing a big role for the Blue Devils in his two seasons there. As a former 5-star recruit, Mitchell and Duke were headed for an amicable separation.
When Missouri stepped in and got the commitment the early reactions had Mitchell as a potential breakout candidate out of the portal. But even with Mitchell on board, expectations outside the program were modest at best. Most prognosticators didn’t have the Tigers competing for the top of the league.
But there also aren’t many who could have foreseen the multitude of ways Dennis Gates would deploy Mitchell offensively.
For all his career marks, which were impressive, Mitchell was never the primary option at Duke. He ran second fiddle to Kyle Filipkowski (and even Jeremy Roach). But at Mizzou, the offense was looking to get Mitchell into mismatches and let him attack the rim.
The result was a consistency in his shooting, but a significant bump in usage.
Mitchell went from a 20.1% usage rate his last season at Duke to a 24.7% rate last year. His % of team shots increased from 18.2% to 23.1%. But his efficiency didn’t suffer, it dipped but only marginally, from 117.3 to 114.7. Mitchell continued to do what he did from the floor at Duke, only more often and with more set designs for him as the first read.
Gates ran actions to get Mitchell the ball on an empty post ups, back screens for a quick duck in, and wing ISOs. He was dynamite in transition, and great as an off ball cutter. If you run through Mitchell’s play-by-play data on Synergy, the variety of play types was diverse but the shot chart wasn’t. It was a myriad of ways to get Mitchell attacking the rim. And he did. Synergy reported Mitchell on 299 field goal attempts, and 219 of those shots were at the rim. That’s 73% of this shots at point blank range.
Getting Mitchell to the rim worked as he finished the season All SEC, and Missouri landed a 6 seed.
He still wasn’t consistent enough, but the Tigers were deep enough to where he wasn’t always needed to be great.
However the change from the beginning of the season to the end saw Mitchell be more consistent with his output. In the final 7 regular season games, even though Mizzou was having a hard time getting wins (they would lose 5 of the 7 games), Mitchell was averaging 19.1 points and 4.7 rebounds with a 60.6% effective field goal rate. The first 7 games of the year saw him average just 11 points.
The first step of player development is finding the things the player does well and making sure they do those things as often as possible. Mitchell will never confuse anyone for being an elite shooter, but he is a long, skilled, and athletic forward who can finish at the rim. So Missouri de-emphasized Mitchell in spot ups and emphasized as many different ways to get him at the rim.
It also took him a little while to find consistency. But he did that too. Now the next step is to unlock new skills. I doubt Mitchell will ever be a high level shooter, but if you can get him to a respectable level, he’ll be damn near impossible to stop on close outs.