This is not the first time we’ve ranked Utah Jazz guard Donovan Mitchell among his peers at the 2-guard position. However, reevaluating the subject at the season’s midyear break did yield some interesting results. First, we’ll tell you how we did it, and then we’ll give you the results.
Ranking Utah Jazz star Donovan Mitchell among his positional peers
The Criteria:
Firstly, a caveat: the NBA is an increasingly positionless league. We leaned on Basketball Reference and FiveThirtyEight to compile data for this exercise. Those two sources don’t always agree on positional designations. For example, FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR (a metric we used here) ranks Fred VanVleet as its top shooting guard.
Well, we consider him a point guard, and Basketball Reference concurs. Other notable omissions from this list include James Harden and DeMar DeRozan. The former has effectively morphed into a point guard, while the latter is listed in some places as a power forward, let alone an off-guard.
Furthermore, a notable inclusion here is Zach LaVine. Incidentally, both of our sources listed him at small forward. Regardless, we consider him a comparable player to the other shooting guards listed here. His basic job description is too similar to an off-guard’s to have left him off this list.
That’s how we selected players. We then ranked them across 3 criteria: points per game, RAPTOR, and Win Shares. Our reasoning was simple enough. We included the basic counting stat of points per game because most of these players, as off-guards, are still bucket-getters first and foremost.
We included RAPTOR because, to our knowledge, it’s the most comprehensive metric available at the moment. RAPTOR uses play-by-play and player tracking data to measure a player’s wins above replacement and individual box plus/minus.
Finally, we included Win Shares because we preferred to reward team success on some level. Here are the ranking for each category:
Where does Utah Jazz guard Donovan Mitchell stack up?
Points per game
- Donovan Mitchell: 25.7
- Devin Booker: 25.5
- Zach LaVine: 24.6
- Anthony Edwards: 21.9
- Tyler Herro: 20.0
RAPTOR
- Donovan Mitchell: 4.1
- Devin Booker: 2.6
- CJ McCollum: 2.0
- Bradley Beal: 1.5
- John Konchar: 1.5
Win Shares
- Donovan Mitchell: 5.4.
- Devin Booker 5.0
- Zach LaVine: 4.2
- Gary Trent Jr: 4.1
- Alec Burks: 3.9
Utah Jazz fans could be entirely forgiven for having a wide grin on their face at this juncture.