Ajay Mitchell could be the next Jalen Brunson, hiding in plain sight

If you woke up from a coma right before the 2026 NBA Playoffs, right now you would think that Ajay Mitchell is the best basketball player in the world. And as he propels the Oklahoma City Thunder to 8-0 in their title defense run, would you be wrong?

I joke, of course, but Mitchell has been on a heater so scorching we have to ask if he might be the next Jalen Brunson — a comparison almost too obvious to use, but we’ll do it anyway. Here are the similarities between Mitchell and Dallas Mavericks Brunson: scoring guards, second-round picks, on a team with a much better number-one option, have elite footwork and shot-hunting ability. And they both demand an answer to the same question: does this guy need his own team?

Ajay Mitchell and 2022 Jalen Brunson are too similar not to compare

(Side note: writing “Mitchell vs. Brunson” comparisons … but they’re for AJAY Mitchell and not DONOVAN Mitchell shows the type of heat we’re cooking with on Ajay Mitchell island right now. We imported some industrial stoves.)

In 2022, Brunson made us all go … uh, yeah, he does, when he was running the Mavericks’ offense throughout the playoffs and scoring in bunches even with Luka Dončić playing as heliocentric as ever. What Mitchell is doing might even be more shocking, though, as while Brunson was pretty squarely the second option on that team, Mitchell is just … doing it. He was a big part of the Thunder rotation all season, and with Jalen Williams missing chunks of time, he stepped up as a major bucket-getter. But this is something quite else: he’s closing games, isolating in the clutch and forcing the Thunder to think hard about how much of their offense they can run through him? Right now, the answer is just … more. 

The Brunson career parallel might take a while to load, given that the Thunder have Mitchell for two more years on a contract so cheap it should be illegal — he is making $4.7 million total in the next two seasons. Heck, I might make $4.7 million in the next two seas — ok, I won’t, but you get the point. Payton Pritchard and Deni Avdija, move over, we have a new best contract in the NBA. 

Brunson and Mitchell have similar games, and could have similar value

But the visual Brunson comp also works, given their shot diet is pretty similar. They both love the mid-range turnaround, and while Mitchell will need to work on his 3-point shooting if he is going to be elite (a concern coming out of UCSB and why he was a second-round pick) he’s already bigger than Brunson and is a much better defender. And his ability to create a shot at the NBA level, the playoff level no less, is self-evidently Brunsonious:

I don’t see any reason the Thunder would trade Ajay Mitchell right now, unless they receive a “we think this guy is the next Brunson so here’s 200 cents on the dollar” trade offer from, say, the Atlanta Hawks, thereby securing the entire draft future of another franchise like they did to the Los Angeles Clippers back in the day. But Mitchell is so valuable to the Thunder as the ultimate injury insurance policy and perhaps their third-best offensive creator behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams. They’d much rather trade a player they will have to pay and just keep rolling terminators off the assembly line like the Droid Factory in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. 

However Mitchell’s career plays out, it’s starting to feel unfair with how the Thunder just keep spawning these guys. They have lottery picks who haven’t played a single game, and Mitchell wasn’t even part of the Death Star system of endless top draft picks; he was a second round pick that anyone could have had. I joke about antitrust legislation every time I write about these guys, but I may not be joking for much longer.

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