The Donovan Mitchell to New York rumors have been non-stop and with Mitchell’s contract with Cleveland expiring this summer, Josh Hart has spoken about the situation.
The Knicks shooting guard is good friends with the man they call Spida, and didn’t do too much to quash the rumors.
“Those are never going to go away,” Josh Hart told The New York Post. “He’s from New York. New York is never going to let that go away. So you’ll never know what happens. That’s for the future, that’s for Knicks Twitter to talk about, and have rumors about, and put up stats of God knows what. But everyone knows that will be an underlying thing.”
NBA fans look for anything to fuel the rumors, which started catching fire once more when Mitchell threw the first pitch for the NY Mets.
Hart explained people are doing too much when it come to things like that.
“Well yeah, his dad works for the Mets,” Hart said. “That’s the thing — people love to make their own narrative. People don’t know the behind-the-scenes things, stuff. Throw out the first pitch at the Mets game and people say, ‘He loves New York, wants to go to New York.’ Don’t know that his dad works for the Mets for 20 years or he’s from New York. You always have so many underlying things where people have no idea, they see just one photo and see something and just run with it.”
The Knicks were heavy favorites to land to trade for Mitchell in the summer of 2022 from the Jazz, but opted out, so he landed in Cleveland.
Knicks GM at that time, Scott Perry, recently explained the team ultimately didn’t make more of push for Mitchell because “he needed more to around him to win”.
“Utah probably would’ve been in the conference finals if he were that singular force,” Perry said on The Hoop Genius. “But he wasn’t that singular force. That’s not a criticism against him. That’s just an evaluation that you must make.”