22 games remain for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and they need to lose two or fewer to become the third 70-win team in NBA history. It might be a long shot at +1000 odds, but Cleveland has won 10 straight and has had three separate 15-game stretches where it went 14-1 or better, including its current hot streak. Across their current win streak, the Cavaliers have posted a plus-15.9 net rating.
In that stretch, shooting guard Donovan Mitchell has gotten hot. For the season, he’s posting his second-lowest usage rate of his career, but over Cleveland’s winning streak, that’s jumped to 32.1%, the fifth-highest in the NBA over that span. During the streak, he’s averaging 26.9 points per game and shooting 49.0% from the field and 40.0% from deep.
The Cavaliers shouldn’t need Mitchell’s heroics tonight to beat the Chicago Bulls, who are 9-19 since the start of January.
On DraftKings Sportsbook, Cleveland is a 12.5-point favorites — even with Evan Mobley resting — and the total is set for 243.5. Below, I’ve highlighted my favorite prop bets centered around Spida.
Best Donovan Mitchell Prop Bets on DraftKings Sportsbook
Donovan Mitchell U25.5 Points (-115)
In order for Mitchell to score lots of points, the game has to be competitive and he has to take the court in the fourth quarter. He has played only 44 total minutes in the final frame across his last eight games, including two in which he did not see the court at all. On February 10 and February 12, he played five minutes or fewer in each of the fourth quarters and scored fewer than 25 points in both of them. In the last five games in which he’s played less than half of the fourth quarter, he’s scored 25 or fewer points in three of them.
Mitchell’s scoring production might be helped by the fact that the Bulls give up the second-most points of any team and by the fact that Mobley will be resting; in a four-game stretch without Mobley in mid-January, Mitchell scored 26 or more points in three our of the four games, including 33 in a game in which he appeared in just four minutes in the fourth quarter. But this team — with De’Andre Hunter and a healthy Isaac Okoro — is deeper than that one was, so he shouldn’t have to carry such a heavy load this time around.
Donovan Mitchell Most Points (+130)
It’s still very conceivable that, even if he finishes with 25 or fewer points, that could be enough to lead the game in scoring. Because the Cavaliers are so deep, they have plenty of options that can go off for 20 or more points, and eight different players have led the team in scoring at some point. It’s very conceivable that five different Cleveland players can have 18 or more points tonight, and that Mitchell scores the most of them.
Plus, the Bulls’ leading scorer, Nikola Vučević, will miss tonight’s game with a calf injury, so the only Chicago player with a realistic shot of dropping more points than Mitchell is Coby White, who also carries an injury designation after spraining his thumb. Besides that, the next highest-scoring Bulls player who is expected to play tonight is Josh Giddey, who has only cleared the 20-point threshold nine times this season and is hampered by a quad injury.
