The Athletic<\/a> released their latest player poll, conducted over All-Star weekend. In the survey, they asked, \u201cWho is the best player in the NBA?\u201d to which Mitchell received the third most votes, behind only Nikola Jokic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and tied with Luka Doncic.<\/p>\nThat would make Mitchell not only the best player in the Eastern Conference according to his peers, but also the best American player in the league.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s one catch. And it\u2019s a big one.<\/p>\n
The Athletic only polled 18 players for this specific question. Jokic received six votes, SGA three, while Luka and Mitchell received two.<\/p>\n
So who voted for Mitchell?<\/p>\n
Well\u2026 Mitchell voted for himself. Telling The Athletic\u2019s Joe Vardon, \u201cCome on, Joe, I gotta say me, always.\u201d<\/p>\n
The other vote? Mitchell\u2019s teammate Jaylon Tyson, who was also at All-Star weekend competing in the Rising Stars challenge. I have to respect a teammate who rides or dies for the other.<\/p>\n
This means we can\u2019t really take anything from this poll. Something tells me the voters were a little biased.<\/p>\n
Either way, Mitchell deserves some recognition. He\u2019s averaging 29 points and 5.9 assists per game while carrying the Cavaliers through a rough start to the season. Now he\u2019s catapulting his team back into the mix as Eastern Conference contenders and is meshing nicely with his new backcourt partner, James Harden.<\/p>\n
The Athletic polled more than 30 players who were in Los Angeles. The full anonymous results of that poll can be found here<\/a>. Other questions from the survey include \u201cWho has the best player podcast?\u201d and \u201cWhat\u2019s the biggest problem facing the league today?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donovan Mitchell is having the best season of his career. If the rest of the league hasn\u2019t noticed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":609219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3772],"tags":[7,306,147,305,193,3846,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-609218","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cleveland-cavaliers","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-cavaliers","10":"tag-cavs-news","11":"tag-cleveland","12":"tag-cleveland-cavaliers","13":"tag-clevelandcavaliers","14":"tag-nba"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116089939560692718","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}