usatsi
No NBA city is perfect, but the one market that consistently seems to create issues between players and fans is Salt Lake City. The Utah Jazz have played there for over four decades, but a common thread in that time has been players voicing frustrations about the actions of the fan base there. Both Russell Westbrook and Ja Morant have had run-ins with those fans in recent years, but even Utah players themselves have struggled in their interactions with them.
Donovan Mitchell is one such player. He spent the first five seasons of his career in Utah, but now that he’s a member of the Cleveland Cavaliers, he’s opening up about the way he was treated by fans in his original NBA city.
“It’s no secret there’s a lot of stuff that I dealt with being in Utah off the floor,” Mitchell told Andscaped’s Marc J. Spears. “If I’m being honest with you, I never really said this, but it was draining. It was just draining on my energy just because you can’t sit in your room and cheer for me and then do all these different things. I’m not saying specifically every fan, but I just feel like it was a lot of things. A [Utah] state senator [Stuart Adams] saying I need to get educated on my own Black history. Seeing Black kids getting bullied because of their skin color. Seeing a little girl [Isabella Tichenor] hang herself because she’s being bullied.”
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