With the score tied halfway through the fourth quarter of Monday night's Game 4 between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Los Angeles Lakers, OKC's Ajay Mitchell sized up Marcus Smart in the left corner. The shot clock was rapidly draining and his teammates were all watched over closely, so it was up to the Belgian sophomore to cook the former Defensive Player of the Year. Mitchell gleefully obliged, crossing over so smoothly he sent Smart tumbling onto the hardwood, then crossing back over and leaping over Smart's prone body to finish in the lane.
With their eventual 115-110 win, the Thunder survived the first close game they've had to play in these playoffs, and completed their second sweep in as many series. The Lakers lost the series by a total of 64 points, yet played about as well as could be expected of a misshapen team whose best player missed the entire series with a hamstring injury, second-best player was contending with an oblique injury, and third-best player is 41 years old. They kept it close through three quarters in most every game and, most impressively of all, held presumptive MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to a relatively unproductive quartet of games.
The Lakers threw everything at Gilgeous-Alexander: early double-teams; hard traps; switches; even honest, vanilla pick-and-roll coverages. In aggregate the approach can be said to have worked, to the narrow extent that Gilgeous-Alexander posted middling counting stats and his post-series interview was mostly about how to battle rust. L.A.'s relative success at bottling SGA was qualified, however, and costly, as the front-end pressure opened stuff up for every other Thunder player, exposed the offensive glass, and exhausted the Lakers. They ran out of gas by the end of every single third quarter and, Game 4 aside, had to watch as the Thunder easily accelerated close games into blowouts.
The man at Oklahoma City's throttle was Mitchell. The Thunder haven't had Jalen Williams, their second-best player, for three weeks, and it hasn't mattered yet, because Mitchell has been amazing.
Probably you are disgusted by this, because people don't like the Thunder and the prospect of them having quarried another legit player from the second round of a draft might feel like wealth hoarding. But personal biases aside—Mitchell is Belgian, so he probably knows who Wout Van Aert is, and he went to UC Santa Barbara—I have to tell you that Mitchell is a really fun player. The trait that leaps off the screen is his feel for the game; he seems to know where everyone is at all times and how best to interact with or avoid them to facilitate the current possession.
Mitchell is the ideal modern point guard: a fearless driver who can finish with either hand, a shooter worth respecting, and a relentless pusher of advantages. He averaged 22.5 points in the Lakers series, on 56-percent shooting, taking charge of the offense when SGA sat or when the Lakers hounded him off the ball. Mitchell carried Game 3 with a 24-point, 10-assist gem, then followed that up with 28 efficient points in the closeout game.
More importantly, Mitchell does cool moves. Look at him flambéeing poor Austin Reaves and then switching the angle of his floater over a tough contest.
This one called Jalen Williams forth up off the bench and left a waiting Gilgeous-Alexander in clear awe. I'd like to think even the most hardened Oklahoma City hater could find it in their heart to at least acknowledge this is cool.
The hardened hater would at this point say that their problem is not with how the Thunder play offense, but rather their commitment to jacking people's shit up on defense. To that point, Mitchell is not out there beating people up like Alex Caruso, Lu Dort, or Cason Wallace, though he's a gifted thief and pocketed four steals last night.
Though Mitchell broke out in the Lakers series, he's been very good for Oklahoma City since he made his NBA debut last season. Mitchell was a Thunder regular in 2024–25, though a toe injury limited him to 36 games and pushed him behind my close personal friend Aaron Wiggins in the playoff rotation. This year, he also missed some time with an abdominal injury, but he was an even more critical part of the team, emerging as the Thunder's second-most reliable perimeter player.
It feels faintly ridiculous that the Thunder, awash as they are in so many surplus lottery picks that they won't even be able to roster all of them going forward, could find a reliable starter with the 38th pick and then sign him to a below-market deal right before he broke out for the world to see, but that's the sort of move that makes Oklahoma City the best organization in the NBA these days. Also, it's not like Mitchell was hiding. The Big West, where he played his college ball, is not Division III, and when you go back and read Mitchell's college scouting reports, everyone was pretty clear that he's an extremely precise player with great vision and a well-rounded game suited to the modern NBA. There were some minor quibbles about his age—he played three years of college ball and turned 22 the day before the 2024 draft began, making him a relative ancient by today's standards—and twitchiness, though Oklahoma City clearly saw his gifts and fast-tracked him to a huge role.
"You could say he's been our best player this series," Gilgeous-Alexander said after the win. I wouldn't go that far, but it was close. Mitchell was fantastic. More importantly, the big test is still coming. The Suns and Lakers are not serious teams, and even if they both have some interesting perimeter defenders whom Mitchell flayed, neither team was going to pose any real problems for the defending champs.
Minnesota and San Antonio are locked in a ferocious battle right now on the other side of the West bracket; no matter who emerges from that series to meet Oklahoma City in the conference finals, each team has both the perimeter defenders and the tall French anchor to make the Thunder's limited offense labor much harder than it has had to so far. Whatever's going on with Williams's hamstring, the Thunder will need more of what Mitchell so brilliantly gave them against Los Angeles.
