It’s early March—the dog days of the NBA schedule—and the Cleveland Cavaliers are trying to surpass fifty wins on the season. Donovan Mitchell crosses the basketball between his legs, steps back, and swishes a three-pointer over six-seven defender Dalen Terry. It jump-starts the run that seals their eleventh win in a row. The dub is expected—this is the third time the Cavs have bested the Bulls this year—but the dynamic shooting guard is feeling especially locked in tonight.

Let’s run it back to Mitchell’s hotel room a few hours before the game. I’m on the phone with the Cavaliers star when he suddenly pauses the conversation to share some news: “Sorry, I just won Player of the Month,” he tells me excitedly. He is stunned. Genuinely.

He’s moved to share something he tells his teammates all the time. “Never take the little things for granted, and that’s not a little thing,” Mitchell says. “Our goal is to win a ring, but something I really talk about with the guys is to enjoy the winning streaks, scoring fifty points and setting records, because there’s only 450 people that play in this league.”

This year, it feels like Mitchell, twenty-eight, has something to celebrate nearly every day. While national sports pundits focus their attention on the Lakers’ soap opera and the Celtics’ pursuit of a title repeat, Mitchell led the Cavaliers to the best record in the NBA through mid-March. It’s a massive vault to the top for this Cleveland crew—and for Mitchell—who stuck together and improved from last season while other teams scrambled to trade away their franchise stars. Now the city is staring down its best chance to win a championship since a certain all-timer named LeBron James left Cleveland—for a second time—in 2018.

Try this for a full-circle moment: When Mitchell was fourteen years old, in 2010, the New York City native stood outside the Boys & Girls Club in Greenwich, Connecticut—right down the street from where he went to school—to watch James’s infamous announcement on live television revealing where he would take his talents. “The Decision” resulted in the basketball superstar leaving the Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. The city was crushed (until LeBron returned to Cleveland, won a title, and left again). But in the years since, Mitchell has matured from a middle schooler watching the Cavaliers on TV to the face of the team.

“I was probably the only person at the time that wanted him to go to the Heat,” Mitchell recalls with a chuckle. The prospect of James teaming up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami? Well, it was a little more exciting to Mitchell than James joining a New York squad that had spent most of the prior season losing games. Still, it’s a tough opinion to say out loud when you’re surrounded by Knicks fans. Mitchell did so anyway. “I almost got hit with a Snapple bottle,” Mitchell remembers, “One of those glass ones.”

They might have disagreed with him about LeBron, but a lot of Knicks fans have wanted to see Mitchell play for his hometown team since he went viral on SportsCenter at age seventeen. At an Under Armour event in Brooklyn, the teenager palmed a lob from half-court with one hand and slammed it through the rim. Some Knicks fans still hold out hope for Mitchell to don the blue and orange someday. “Who doesn’t want to be home, next to their mom?” the athlete told reporters at a Cavaliers press conference in 2022. Never say never. Right now, though, the Knicks are one of the teams standing between Mitchell and a title.

At six-three, Mitchell is not particularly tall for an NBA star, even for a guard. But it helps that his wingspan is the length of the average billiard table. With his long arms spreading out to six-ten, Mitchell was nicknamed “Spida” in grade school by a teammate’s father. Mitchell embraced it. “I was definitely made fun of for calling myself something other than my name,” he says, “but I was like, ‘No, this is me.’ ”

Mitchell’s unique skill set led to early NBA success. In his rookie season with the Utah Jazz, Mitchell broke records set by Allen Iverson, won the 2018 Slam Dunk Contest, and inked a shoe deal with Adidas. But over his five seasons in Utah as an elite-level scorer, Mitchell never figured out how to bring home the title. Then, in 2021, Shaquille O’Neal bluntly told Mitchell live on Inside the NBA that he didn’t believe he had what it takes to win a championship. Mitchell simply shrugged it off by saying, “I’ve been hearing that since my rookie year.”

Despite a fixation on his losses by some in the media, Mitchell remains an NBA success story worth celebrating. In 2023, he became just the seventh player in NBA history to score more than 70 points in a single game. Even LeBron James hasn’t matched that achievement. Last summer, Mitchell signed a three-year, $150 million contract extension with the Cavaliers. And he remains undeterred in his quest for a ring.

“When I got traded to Cleveland, people just assumed it would click right away, but you have to grow,” Mitchell says. “The real question is how you continue to get better throughout the season. We beat Boston at their place. But how do we respond tonight against Chicago? How can we be the best team possible?”

As the league heads into the playoffs, Mitchell now finds himself in the best position to win a championship of his career. “The pieces fit,” he says. Alongside Mitchell, Cleveland’s starting lineup includes All-Stars Darius Garland and Jarrett Allen, long-range specialist Max Strus, and perennial Defensive Player of the Year candidate Evan Mobley. By now, Cleveland should have proved to every sports pundit and Las Vegas bettor that it’s a serious contender for the Larry O’Brien trophy.

And yet there are still disbelievers. “Once we do what we believe we can do,” Mitchell says, almost as if it’s a certainty, “that will definitely change.”

Off the court, Mitchell found a way for his name to live on in the history books that doesn’t involve counting rings. His family just opened a brand-new facility called the DON Gym at his alma mater, Greenwich Country Day School. (In addition to his name, DON stands for Determination over Negativity.) “I wanted to be able to give Black and brown students the opportunity to attend just like I did,” says Mitchell, whose foundation also awards grants and scholarships to hardworking students every year.

Most importantly, the DON Gym stands roughly ten feet away from his mother’s classroom. Nicole Mitchell was a teacher at the school for thirteen years. “She sacrificed a lot of herself for us to attend a private school,” Mitchell says. “There was no NBA dream. She just did it because I loved to play basketball. Seeing that is why I want to give her the world.”

Sure, it’s not a win that Mitchell can put on a stat sheet, or yet another individual award, or even a championship. But after listening to him talk about the gym that bears his name, I can tell it means everything.