The Cleveland Cavaliers’ recent four-game losing streak ended any chance they had to become just the third 70-win team in NBA history, but did it take off their shine as a bona fide championship contender?
It depends on how much you believe in Donovan Mitchell as a playoff performer. The four-game skid can primarily be attributed to his hideous 30-16-95 shooting splits in the losses, but he and the team have turned it around in their last four games. It’s worthy of note that he averages 28.1 points per game in the postseason, the seventh-highest scoring average in NBA history, although his efficiency — 51.0% career effective field goal percentage — is 1.6 percentage points worse than his regular-season mark.
Before they get there, though, the Cavaliers have a chance to clinch home court advantage throughout the Eastern Conference playoffs tonight if they beat the San Antonio Spurs and the Boston Celtics fall to the Phoenix Suns.
On DraftKings Sportsbook, Cleveland is a 13-point favorite and the total is set for 241.5. Below, I’ve laid out my favorite prop bets centered around Mitchell.
Best Donovan Mitchell Prop Bets on DraftKings Sportsbook
Donovan Mitchell 30+ Points (+175)
There’s no reason this game should be close, but it probably will be. After all, when these two teams faced off last Thursday, the Cavaliers won by just eight points, although, to be fair, Evan Mobley wasn’t playing in that contest. Cleveland needed basically all 25 of Mitchell’s points in order to win, with his back-court partner Darius Garland shooting just four-for-15 from the field. San Antonio, despite going just 9-15 since the All-Star break, has been a feisty unit, with just a negative-5.0 net rating. All credit for the Spurs’ resilience goes to shooting guard Stephon Castle, who is going to run away with the Rookie of the Year award in a draft class that, a year in, looks fairly deep even in its absence of superstars.
This game is a perfect storm for Mitchell. San Antonio’s defense is terrible, but its offense — even without the injured Jeremy Sochan — is just good enough to keep challenging the Cavaliers and forcing them to make their shots. Individually, Castle is a fierce competitor and fights on both sides of the ball, but his rookie woes include inefficient shooting and inconsistent individual defense. Defensive box plus-minus doesn’t totally capture the intangibles that are such a big part of Castle’s game, but it ranks him as the 10th-worst defender in the league, which underscores his inability to properly contain Mitchell. Even since his breakout, opponents are shooting 6.1 percentage points better than usual against him.
Donovan Mitchell O5.5 Rebounds (+120)
Unsurprisingly, this Spurs team has been awful on the boards since the All-Star break, given that it was bad prior to Victor Wembanyama’s injury and then lost the seven-foot-three star for the season. Without Wemby, San Antonio has the league’s third-lowest rebounding percentage and has allowed the fifth-most rebounds in the league. Sochan’s absence should exacerbate that problem even further today; the six-foot-eight Polish international has the 79th-highest offensive rebounding percentage among the 563 players who have taken the court this season, a 9.9% figure that would’ve ranked 13th if he’d played enough minutes to qualify.
Mitchell is also a pretty solid rebounder for an undersized shooting guard, thanks to his 99th-percentile athleticism and six-foot-10 wingspan. In fact, four of his six double-doubles this season have been point-rebound double-doubles, and he’s actually grabbed six or more rebounds nearly as many times (20) as he’s dished out six or more assists (26). He’s put his leaping ability on full display in his past four games, snagging five or more boards in each game, including a 12-rebound performance on Sunday against the LA Clippers, who rank fifth in the league in rebounding. He also grabbed eight in the win over the Spurs last week.
