The Whiteboard: Where does Mitchell-Murray rank among legendary NBA playoff duels?
By Ian Levy
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The Denver Nuggets and Utah Jazz launched the 2020 NBA playoffs with an epic game — 57 points for Donovan Mitchell falling short as he was outdueled in the final moments by Jamal Murray’s clutch-shotmaking. Five games later and the intensity hasn’t abated at all.
The series is split 3-3 with Game 7 scheduled for Tuesday night. Mitchell is averaging and 38.7 points, 5.5 assists and 4.3 rebounds per game, shooting 54.8 percent from the field and 55.4 percent from beyond the arc. Earlier in the series, he joined Allen Iverson and Michael Jordan as the only players in NBA history to have multiple 50-point games in the same playoff series. And, somehow Murray’s number might be even more impressive.
He’s averaging 34.0 points, 6.7 assists and 6.0 rebounds per game, shooting 58.5 percent from the field and 57.4 percent on 3-pointers. He has a true shooting percentage of 91.7 percent on 17 clutch true shooting attempts in this series and, in Game 6, he joined the same exclusive club Mitchell broke into, with his second 50-point game in the series.
Just one more stat for how ridiculous these two have been — the Jazz and Nuggets have combined to score 1406 points in the six games of this series. Through their own scoring or points created by assist, Murray and Mitchell have been responsible for 638 of them, 45.7 percent.
Is Donovan Mitchell and Jamal Murray one of the greatest NBA playoff duels ever?
Their duel is at least somewhat, a narrative construction. Both teams have let their offensive stars save energy for offense, and they’ve each only defended the other for about 10 percent of their possessions. But they way they’ve traded blows and fueled everything for their teams pulls them into a sort of oppositional symmetry. The NBA has had countless great NBA playoff duels but they often tend to be much longer or shorter arcs — personal rivalries fueled by matchups over multiple seasons or single-game performances when the stakes peak.
There is some simmering “best young guard” rivalry here but it doesn’t have a national hook. The fact that the Nuggets could have drafted Mitchell is, similarly, more of a regional soft spot. This doesn’t have the heat of Bird-Magic, Durant-LeBron or Jordan against whoever had slighted him most recently but in terms of sheer production, this is on the level of Durant and LeBron in the 2017 NBA Finals (offensive efforts that only needed to be sustained for five games, though).
Another epic in Game 7 could really cement both players in the postseason record books. Two made 3-pointers by either player would put them past Stephen Curry for the most made 3s in a single playoff series. An improbable but not impossible 53-point game for Mitchell would give him the record for most points in a single playoff series. A simple 50-point game for either would have them ditching the Iverson-Jordan gang for a one-man club of their own.
Again, history may not have much to make of an unprecedented first-round battle between two teams likely destined for a second-round loss at best, headlined by two players whose career ceilings probably fall well short of all-time-great. But I think you could argue, in terms of pure production, this matchup is as good as anything we’ve ever seen.
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