Overview:
Ajay Mitchell helped defeat the Los Angeles Lakers last week by averaging 22.5 points in a four-game series sweep that put them into this week’s Western Conference Finals against the San Antonio Spurs
A wise-cracking blogger addressed the charmed life of the NBA’s defending champions last week.
It’s Oklahoma City’s good fortune, he mused, that they don’t have to deal with something like college basketball’s transfer portal.
You figure it would get Ajay Mitchell, the lowest-paid player on the Oklahoma City Thunder’s playoff roster, wearing a “for sale” sign on his jersey when the NBA Western Conference Finals against the San Antonio Spurs begin on Monday.
But you’d have to figure again.
The second-year point guard from UC Santa Barbara has, indeed, averaged 18.8 points and 4.9 assists in eight playoff games so far — all victories — for a team that has a 57-9 record when he’s on the floor.
“It’s been amazing,” gushed NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander during last week’s four-game sweep of the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference semifinals.
“You can say he’s been our best player this series.”
Jalen Williams, an NBA All-Star-turned-spectator by a hamstring injury, described his Thunder teammate more succinctly: “Very major mid-major.”
OKC, very tellingly, went just 15-9 this season when Mitchell was the one sitting out with an injury.
But those records don’t jive with the numbers in his three-year contract: The paltry $3 million he’s receiving this season will decrease to $2.85 million for each of the following two years.
Winning doesn’t usually lead to financial losing in professional sports.
Kevin O’Connor of Yahoo Sports called it “The biggest discount in the whole NBA.”
But if you think Mitchell wants to get the Dodge out of Oklahoma City, you weren’t paying attention to the staying power he displayed during three years at UCSB.
“Very few times in this day and age do you have someone that loyal,” Gaucho coach Joe Pasternack said.
Home is where Mitchell’s heart is, and Santa Barbara became just that for the Belgian expatriate.
He felt comfortable growing his game at UCSB’s Thunderdome. He’s felt the same about OKC’s Paycom Center.
He even moved his mother, Fabienne Wagemans, 4,882 miles from Liége, Belgium, to the southern Great Plains last year to become part of his new Thunder family.
“I just think the bonds that we were able to build from Day One were pretty special,” Mitchell said of his OKC brothers.
Gaucho for Life
Those kinds of connections kept him at UCSB.
Pasternack said he’ll never forget the conversation they had after Mitchell won the Big West Conference’s Freshman of the Year Award for the 2021-2022 season.
“We were sitting in my car talking, and I knew he had a lot of people in his ear saying, ‘You should go into the portal to see your value,’” he said. “Every other Freshman of the Year from a mid-major school wound up transferring that year.
“But he told me, I’m not going to do that, coach, because, as I told my mom, if I go in the portal, he’ll replace me at point guard, and I don’t want to lose my spot.’”
Mitchell tightened his grip on that spot during his sophomore season by propelling the Gauchos to the NCAA tournament.
Pasternack had to brace himself again after he was named as the Big West’s Player of the Year.
“Ajay could have gotten a ridiculous amount of money at one of these high-major Blue Bloods,” he said.
But he stayed put once again.
“It’s home for me,” Mitchell explained simply.
He had to get defensive about that after a nationally televised game at Golden State in December.
The NBC crew asked him to record two takes — one serious and one funny — in which he recites his name and alma mater for TV’s starting introductions.
They showed Mitchell announcing his school as Belgian Waffle University.
“Didn’t expect him to put it out,” he said. “I think I was the only one with the funny one.
“I had a lot of guys reach out to say it was funny … People from my school were a little upset.
“So I’ve got a shout-out to UC Santa Barbara.”
He returns to the school every summer.
“This is where he comes and trains during the offseason with our strength coach, works out in our gym, spends time with our players,” Pasternack said.
The Gaucho coach and his family spent time with Mitchell and his mother before and after Game 3 in Los Angeles.
“We’re like family,” he said. “Fabianne comes and stays in my house, and she and my daughter, Lilly, are very close. They text all the time. My wife, Lindsay, does, too.
“You know, it’s definitely a different relationship than I usually have with players and their mothers. Fabianne is definitely family to us.”
Mitchell’s enduring ties to Santa Barbara include his longtime girlfriend, a Santa Barbara High School graduate. They met during his freshman year at UCSB.
He also connected with his fellow Gauchos soon after his arrival from Belgium that season.
“Everyone on the team went to a barbecue at the house of a teammate (Max Sheldon), and we all hung out over there for hours,” Mitchell recalled.
“It was great to see how close we could get in a couple weeks.”
Team Player
His friendly and humble nature helped nurture a close-knit locker room during his three years at UCSB.
“It speaks to Ajay’s personality that even though he got all the attention, none of the older guys like Amadou Sow or Andre Kelly were jealous,” Pasternack said. “They all respected him.
“They were all so close.”
Mitchell also saw the basketball benefit to staying at UCSB.
He could grow his game best as the team’s lead guard — a position that Pasternack had bequeathed to him by the fifth game of his freshman year.
Mitchell also wanted to fill out his 6-foot-4 frame — which has now been muscled to more than 200 pounds — at Santa Barbara’s P3 Peak Performance Project training center.
“He was 170 pounds dripping wet when he got here,” Pasternack recalled.
Mitchell resisted the temptation of jumping the gun to a pro career and declined to submit his name for the 2023 NBA draft.
“It was just a lot more experience, playing three years of college,” he said.
“I feel I got better every year, and every year I was preparing myself to be ready to play right away in the NBA.”
There was always a method to his money-delaying madness.
Mitchell saw the big picture when the Thunder — a winning organization known for developing its young players — offered the three-year contract last year.
“He passed up short-term money for long-term money, and he now might eventually get a max deal out of all this,” Pasternack said.
Mitchell came off the bench in 41 of the 57 games he played during this year’s regular season.
He still averaged 13.6 points and 3.6 assists while shooting 48.5% to finish fifth in the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year voting.
OKC coach Mark Daigneault had no qualms about throwing him into the starting lineup when Williams reinjured his hamstring midway through the first-round playoff series against the Phoenix Suns.
“This is a big stage, and he doesn’t blink,” he said after Mitchell scored 22 points in the series-clinching victory in Phoenix. “He does a great job of just continuing to stay in character … It’s probably the most impressive thing.
“He doesn’t really press or break who he is.
“He plays his game … Plays aggressive, but he stays inside the team.”
Mitchell drew raves around the basketball world after scoring 24 points with 10 assists and no turnovers in the 131-108 victory over the Lakers in Game 3 at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena.
“It just felt like every time they had something, Ajay had an answer,” Gilgeous-Alexander said.
It marked the first time a Thunder player had recorded no turnovers while getting at least 20 points and 10 assists since the club moved to Oklahoma City from Seattle in 2008.
Mitchell helped seal the Lakers’ doom in Game 4, 115-110, when he scored a career-high 28 points on 12-for-19 shooting. He also had four steals.
“Yeah, he’s a gamer,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “Works super hard. He’s never shaken by the moment.
“It might be a shock to the world, but it’s no shock to us.
“We knew who Ajay Mitchell was the day he stepped foot in our building, and he’s just showing it to the world.”
Keeping the Faith
He had returned from toe surgery just before last year’s playoffs and saw limited playing time during OKC’s run to the championship.
Daigneault, who watched Mitchell excel when the end-of-bench reserves scrimmaged, still second-guesses himself about that.
“I look back on that, and I say he’s making me look bad,” he said. “We knew what we had. … I’d be sitting over here a year ago and watching him in these high-intensity things … Like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’”
One of the things he likes best about Mitchell is how he remains unfazed by bad moments.
“It really doesn’t matter what happened the last possession or the last half or the last game, which is usually a mark of a more veteran player,” Daigneault said. “He’s got an innate ability to do that.
“He hangs in there long enough to play well.”
Mitchell credits his calm and confident disposition to his strong Christian beliefs.
He experienced a revival of that faith during his second season as a Gaucho.
“A friend who was a mentor at a church at UCSB reached out to me and one of my teammates,” Mitchell said. “At first, I didn’t really feel like going.
“But during my sophomore year, I felt like I needed to hear the word of God … It honestly changed how I viewed myself, others, and I started to really understand what the word of God is about.
“When it gets overwhelming, I just talk to God. That’s where I find peace.”
He leaned on that faith after the deaths of two close family members.
Jenny Jacobs, the grandmother who helped raise him in Belgium, died 15 months ago.
The father who sparked his interest in basketball died unexpectedly after suffering a heart attack last December.
Barry Mitchell, a former Norfolk State star, had won MVP honors in both the World Basketball League and the Continental Basketball Association — the NBA G League’s predecessor — before establishing himself during a long career in Belgium.
The night after his death, his son scored 16 points, grabbed seven rebounds and handed out five assists in a 122-101 victory over the Los Angeles Clippers.
And then he broke down and wept in the team’s film room.
“He would have wanted me to keep going,” Mitchell said. “Anytime something would happen to him, if he was feeling sick or not great mentally at some point in his life, he would be like, ‘Don’t worry about me, keep doing you … As long as you’re good, I’m good.’
“I wanted to honor him.”
Many honors — and, yes, lucrative contracts — are sure to grace Ajay Mitchell before he plays his last game of basketball.
He won’t turn 24 until after the NBA Finals play out next month.
But he appreciates the journey he’s already taken from Belgium to UCSB’s Thunderdome and to the OKC Thunder.
“Looking back to myself as a little kid in Belgium, just dreaming of playing in the NBA,” he said, “and then God putting me in those positions … I just really feel grateful.”
It makes him feel like a million dollars … more than three times over.
