When Donovan Mitchell sat down for his postgame interview following the Utah Jazz’s playoff-eliminating Game 6 loss to the Dallas Mavericks on Thursday night, I asked him a straightforward question: “Do you want to be in Utah?”
Mitchell nodded his head and said, “yes.”
Noise from an open door and people entering the interview room interrupted Mitchell, so I asked the question again: “Donovan, do you want to be in Utah?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We were given a chance to win and we fell short of that goal and ... this hurts, Sarah. I ain’t gonna lie. But, yeah.”
With a small shrug and nod with that final word, it seemed like it was Mitchell’s way of putting to bed any rumors that he might want leave the Jazz.
About three minutes later Tim McMahon from ESPN asked this question: “How do you feel about your immediate fit here in Utah and is this a core — this group that’s been together for a while — that needs a shakeup?”
“It’s tough to ask me that right now,” Mitchell said. “I’m a competitor and I feel like if you give us another crack at it we could go get it, but on the same token there’s things that could change. I’m not ready to discuss that, to be honest with you. Mentally I’m just not in that headspace. ... If you ask me that in a week or so maybe, but I’m not really in the headspace to answer that for you.”
McMahon followed up.
“Sarah asked you straight up if you want to be in Utah, so let’s just put it all out there,” he said. “There’s been a lot of discussion, you could say from the media, but it’s discussion around the league and it’s not coming out of thin air, that you could potentially ask out. Can you address that?”
Mitchell responded.
“My mindset is to win,” he said. “Right now I’m not really looking at that. I answered Sarah’s question and you can take that. For me, I just want to win, yo. Like I said, I’ll think about it in a week, but right now, Tim, I’m not really thinking about any of that. And I said that during the year, I’m just not thinking about that.”
I think that in his first response to McMahon, Mitchell was more addressing how the rest of the team could change, not really about his own future with the Jazz. On McMahon’s follow-up, that’s where it got a little murky.
On one hand, you could argue that Mitchell tried to just get out of the question by saying he’d already answered it and that he wasn’t in the right place mentally to think about the future. But, the fact that he mentioned he’d think about it at a later date, does seem to infer that his answer could be different after some more thought.
Does that mean that Mitchell’s answer could be different depending on what direction the team chooses to go? Does it mean that Mitchell’s answer could be different after hearing offers from other teams? Does it mean that he could circle back and decide that he wants to stay with the Jazz? We don’t know.
And Mitchell won’t be around next week to check back in. He has no media obligations from now until training camp for the 2022-23 season begins.
So now we wait.
