All anyone can seemingly focus on when it comes to the breakout campaign of OKC Thunder guard Ajay Mitchell are the positives.
Frankly, whether it's him holding down the secondary scoring fort on the league's top team while All-NBA forward Jalen Williams was sidelined, or the sheer fact that he's earning less than a ton of rookie-scale players while doing so, such narratives are hard to ignore.
However, coinciding with these exciting storylines is the harsh reality that Mitchell's strong play could easily be the reason his tenure with the Thunder could be capped at only a few short years.
Strong play of Ajay Mitchell could price him off Thunder roster
During a recent edition of the Game Theory Podcast, hosts Sam Vecenie & Bryce Simon were found raving about the "incredible season" Mitchell has been having, and even went so far as to draw parallels between his rise in the association and that of current New York Knicks star, Jalen Brunson.
This latter talking point is the one Thunder fans should be both elated and frightened by all at the same time.
On the one hand, the fact that Oklahoma City found such a promising player in the second round of the 2024 NBA Draft is something that deserves to be commended.
Considering they have committed north of $800 million in new deals to the likes of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Williams, and Chet Holmgren alone, finding diamonds in the rough talents like Mitchell is really the only way they can have a chance of circumventing the dreaded second apron threshold moving forward.
Of course, because of the club's ever-growing payroll, such players are bound to have short shelf lives. Once their first standard NBA contracts come to an end, it's more than likely that trying to re-sign them will inch OKC closer to suffering from the new CBA's crippling tax penalties.
Mitchell's current contract runs through the 2027-28 season via a club option, and with an average cap percentage of sub-2.0 percent, it's safe to say Sam Presti and company will look to hold onto his services throughout.
However, once he hits the open waters of free agency during the summer of 2028, assuming he can keep up a similar level of play, the current belief is that he, like Brunson while with the Dallas Mavericks back in 2022, could receive an offer too lucrative for the Thunder to match and, thus, see him heading outbound.
Though comparing the two guards is far from seamless, as Simon noted in the podcast, "the leap from where Ajay Mitchell is at right now to Jalen Brunson, that's a long leap," Vecenie would somewhat counter this by pointing out that "Ajay's first two years have been a little bit better than Jalen's first two years."
At the very least, however, both are aligned on the idea that the sophomore has shown the potential of being a starting-caliber player in the league, which, in turn, almost automatically suggests that, unless the Thunder can find a way to cut costs significantly between now and 2028, his days donning the orange, blue, and yellow threads may be capped at just two more seasons.