Nylon Calculus: Donovan Mitchell and Luka Doncic are offensive machines

Donovan Mitchell and Luka Doncic are both creating offense at historic postseason rates. Can they keep it up long enough to make the record books?

The offensive exploits of Luka Doncic and Donovan Mitchell have been the defining stories of the first round of the NBA Playoffs. Mitchell went for 57 points in a Game 1 loss to the Nuggets has been a relentless offensive engine as the Jazz have won the next three to take control of the series.

Doncic set a record for most points in a playoff debut with 42 in Game 1 and hasn’t slowed down a bit, knocking down an epic overtime buzzer-beater in Game 4 to even the series with the Clippers. Both players have been scoring at absurd rates but they’ve also been piling up assists. In fact, between scoring and assists, they’ve both been creating an average of more than 50 points per game.

The graph below charts every player who has appeared in the playoffs this season by their average time of possession per game and the average number of points they’ve created per game, through both scoring and assists.

You can see how far ahead of the pack Mitchell and Doncic are in terms of points created, and Doncic’s absurd outlier average time of possession, a full minute longer than anyone else. I’ve included time of possessions here because I think it’s a reasonable proxy for the offensive load each player is carrying and just how much defensive attention they’re getting. They are creating huge quantities of scoring opportunities and doing it with the ball in their hands, against a defense set to deal with them as the primary point of attack.

Harden is also over that 50 points created per game threshold, although he’s not quite as far ahead of the field as Mitchell and Doncic. Malcolm Brogdon dropped below it after the Pacers’ Game 4 loss to the Heat. That leaves three players — Harden, Doncic and Mitchell — on a historic pace.

Has anyone in recent memory created as much postseason offense as Donovan Mitchell and Luka Doncic?

The graph below shows every player who averaged at least 7.0 minutes of possession per game across their entire postseason run going back to 2013-14, the first season for which tracking data is available.

As you would expect, LeBron pops several times towards the top of the points created pile, with John Wall‘s ball-dominance showing up as well. And, of course, Russell Westbrook‘s monstrous 2016-17 postseason. The one other variable we haven’t mentioned yet is the length of the postseason run. Mitchell, Doncic and Harden have both played just four games each and it’s more than likely there will be some regression to the mean. The table below shows every player since 2013-14 who has averaged at least 50 points created per game and notes the number of postseason games they played that season.

Westbrook’s extreme outlier performance in 2016-17 was in just five games before the Thunder were eliminated. What the table above really shows is that no one is on LeBron’s level when it comes to offensive creation. He’s averaged above 50 points created per game in three separate postseason runs, each of which lasted at least 18 games. Westbrook and Wall are the only other players who have pulled it off a run of double-digit games.

Doncic, Mitchell and Harden are all in historic territory. But they’d need to play at this level through the end of the first-round series and at least one more series but we could really discuss them rivaling what LeBron has already done.