Mitchell scored 31 points. Or, rather, only 31 points, on 35 shots – as many as Utah’s four other starters combined. Oh, and 0 assists. Zero.
It was the second 35-shot, 0-assist night of the last 20 years. But the other was acceptable. It was Carmelo Anthony’s 62-point isolation masterpiece against the Bobcats in 2014. The Knicks won that game, and Melo scored twice as much as Mitchell did Friday.
For the last such performance in a loss, we have to go all the way back to January 1998. To Antoine Walker, who had 49 points on 21-of-36 shooting in a Boston Celtics loss to Phoenix. But even Walker’s individual line was more than satisfactory.
In fact, so were most of the 34 other 35-shot, no-assist games in NBA history. (Twenty-two of them, per Basketball Reference, belong to Wilt Chamberlain.) No player had scored as few points as Mitchell on as many field goal attempts without an assist since Elvin Hayes went for 28 on 40 shots in a 1969 San Diego Rockets’ loss to the Detroit Pistons.
We talk about players putting up video game numbers after awesome games, but those are some video game numbers of another kind.
