This is the mentality that often ends up being his undoing. On the surface, and if we try to pretend we don't know the context and somehow unbias ourselves, it sounds like someone is taking some kind of responsibility, which is often an important emphasis on personal development and self-awareness. However, though this superficially may appear to be a more mature statement, it actually shows less self-awareness and more situation misdiagnosis. The answer isn't "harder," "faster," or "stronger," it's really taking a step back. Donovan doesn't need to be "doing more" (on the offensive side). He needs to be calming down and being in control. It's like Marty McFly being called chicken. It only throws him off of what he does well and starts behaving in a way to compensate for insecurity that ends up working against him. My biased belief is that Donovan sees this as being "all on me" and ends up approaching the game as if everyone is on his shoulders. The answer is always "more cowbell!" We had a "historic offense" and every time our collective psyche got nervous about another perceived failure, we got higher and higher doses of offensive Donovan and negligible doses of Mike, Bojan, Joe, Rudy or Jordan. "Out of the way, guys... let this MFer go to work." That work just never seemed to... well, work.
This is why I say that if Minnesota sweeps tonight, the pressure is really on for Donovan tomorrow. His often default response to the pressure is an attempt to do more, when what is really needed is to be more aware. It's Donovan's Chinese finger trap. The natural inclination is thinking you need to get your fingers apart, which further ensnares you in the trap. As a result, you continue to perpetuate the problem in an attempt to escape it. The answer in reality the answer is to take control of this, advance your fingers to release the tension, and get out of it. His destructive tendency is to double and triple down "these are the hard shots I spend all summer working on, they just aren't falling" (paraphrase). In the back of his mind he's got some Sports Center lines running through his head, "Donovan Mitchell puts the Cavs on his back and wills them to victory!" The pressure will be quite large to not fall back 2-3 in the series if his former teammate foe just experienced a first round sweep. That grandiose Sports Center voice will push "large dose Donovan" for a sufficient amount of time to realize it's not working until anxiety then fuels the rest in believing the only way out is through and the only answer is more bites at the apple -- an even large dose of offense.
He's so incredibly talented that if he could harness this it would really be something.
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