Jazz-Rockets Far From a 2018 Redo As Personnel, Strategies Shift

Harden drives right, as he often was forced to do by Rubio’s Jazz. (Bill Baptist via Rockets.com)

The Jazz’s upcoming playoff series against the Houston Rockets is an interesting 2018 rematch, but it certainly won’t be a 2018 redo. Because of available personnel and shifting defensive strategies, the battlefield for this best-of-seven showdown is going to be a very different type of terrain than it was for the Rockets’ 5-game series win last May.

That doesn’t mean Utah will win, but it means the analysis of the next four to seven games needs to start somewhere other than the 2018 Western Conference Semis. When teams face off in playoff series in consecutive years, it’s often natural to use the previous year as a jumping off point to forecast where the rematch will go. You take last year’s result as a baseline, then you add or subtract from that based on what has changed. Usually, that’s a fine place to start.

Not this time. Throw last year’s series out. Tactically, both teams are going to operate differently than they did last spring.

Houston’s defensive about-face

Last year’s Jazz-Rox series was all about Houston’s switching defense. With a roster of mostly plus defenders around MVP James Harden, the Rockets were perhaps the most switch-happy club in basketball a season ago. Versatile defenders like Trevor Ariza, Luc Mbah a Moute and PJ Tucker gave Houston the luxury of always keeping someone in front of the ball, and that stymied Utah’s attack.

That’s Houston’s side of things. For Utah, it didn’t help that Ricky Rubio’s injury left the club down a facilitator, so they had limited options for attacking switches and puncturing the defense. They mostly relied on Donovan Mitchell’s creation ability, but that meant the erstwhile rookie was forced to generate a huge chunk of Utah’s offense while being checked by a really good defender. As a result, his efficiency tailed off. For the series, he averaged 19.4 points on 20 shots, and made just 25% of his threes. Houston also knew that if they choked Mitchell’s drives after he got below the free throw line, he’d be forced to take a tough shot or reset back to the perimeter, where Utah didn’t really have anybody else who could consistently break the defense down.

However, not much about those two previous paragraphs remains the same. This time around, Houston enters the fray with fewer elite, switchable defenders, and therefore is switching less overall. And Rubio should be available to the Jazz, which gives them another way to cut through switches anyway. The four games they’ve played this season point to a very different kind of battled being waged.

A rewatch of all 824 regular-season possessions involving these two teams gave a good indication of what may lie ahead tactically. This season’s sample was a little weird, too; Chris Paul missed the first and last games (and Clint Capela missed one, too), and the Rockets’ one blowout win came during that odd stretch when Harden was dragging the team through injury problems by methodically and efficiently operating as a 1-man offense. Those games probably will bear little resemblance to what we’re about to see, even if we can glean some strategic intel from them.

But the two middle games — a blowout home win by Utah, followed by a narrow Rockets victory in Houston — are particularly enlightening if we’re to guess how the teams will approach one another.

In that early December matchup, Houston was still trying to get its switch-heavy defense to work despite changing personnel. But Ariza and Mbah a Moute, arguably their best switchers, had moved on in free agency. Their system was less effective with the likes of Austin Rivers and Danuel House (and, for a while at least, Carmelo Anthony) plugged into those retention spots, which was a huge factor behind a disappointing 11-14 start.

And specifically when they faced Utah twice in that early stretch, the availability of both Rubio and Mitchell — and even reserve guard Dante Exum who played a big role in those wins — made it harder to thwart Utah’s attack that way. Rubio and Mitchell were aggressive, and the Jazz ran a bunch of layered actions and double screens. The logic behind that is that if Houston has so-so defenders trying to switch through multiple screens, the likelihood of someone eventually messing up and leaving a path to the rim is pretty high.

Plays like this made it evident that Houston no longer had the personnel to stop teams by switching on every screen. Through their first 25 games, they had a bottom-7 NBA defense, per Cleaning the Glass. Something needed to change.

Around that time, Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni explained to the Houston Chronicle that his squad would no longer switch everything. “There will be times when a guy gets hit and he can’t get through and you have to switch, but now it’s on a have-to basis, not a we-want-to basis. We’ll try to keep a big guy at home, try to keep him where he rebounds more.”

So by the next time the Rockets faced the Jazz, Utah saw a very different defensive team. They still switched most wing-to-wing screening actions, but they no longer had a switch-at-all costs mentality. Houston had the big man show hard, forcing the ball handler to take an extra step or two to the outside while his man recovered. The more traditional approach helped them climb out of the cellar, but they still ended the season just below average for per-possession defense (18th, excluding garbage time and heaves).

Of course, the identity shift was recent, so the Rockets were still learning the new rules of when to switch and when not to. And Utah is more used to attacking regular P&R defense with a hedging big, so they were able to create good looks at the rim and open threes in that trip to Houston. The only problem: there was also a lid on the bucket. At the half, Utah was just 6-for-16 at the rim and 4-for-16 on open or wide open threes, and consequently trailed by 13. They’d eventually get back into that game by executing against Houston’s more conservative defense, and even had the game tied at 94-all at the two-minute mark. But then Harden made two long threes to pull away.

But those two games are a perfect illustration of Houston’s defensive shift. They switched everything in their early December matchup, and got torched for it. By later that same month, they were playing more traditional pick-and-roll defense, which essentially turned that next Jazz-Rox game into a make-or-miss affair. Utah just missed more than they made.

Houston still switches guard-guard stuff. They still switch late  If we see a lot of Tucker-at-center lineups, those groups will probably switch liberally. But they will no longer switch every pick. It’s  just not their approach anymore.

Bottom line: switching won’t be quite the theme it was a year ago. A healthy Rubio gives Utah more ways to attack it when it does happen, but Houston’s defensive identity is different than it was last spring.

Slowing the MVP

So that’s Utah’s offensive end. What about their vaunted defense, about to be tested by one of the league’s most unstoppable scorers?

As they do against most elite scorers, the Jazz showed Harden some different defensive looks in their four meetings this season. But there were a few common threads, such as: 1) don’t foul, and 2) don’t let him get left in one-on-one situations.

Rubio was really good at this, and his availability alone is a massive and important distinction between last spring’s series and this one. He still got beat — partially because everybody does against the reigning MVP and partially because Rubio’s lateral movement isn’t always quick enough to keep him in front of guys. But Rubio understands schemes extremely well. He knows what the Jazz are trying to do and he executes it well. As the intrepid Riley Gisseman pointed out, Utah beat Houston by 4.9 points per 100 possessions when Rubio was on the court this season, and lost by 7.8 when he wasn’t.

He guarded Harden more than anybody else — 123 Rockets trips ended with Rubio defending the Beard, per NBA tracking. Those possessions ended with Harden shooting 14-for-31 and turning the ball over 10 times. The Rockets’ offense produced 113 points on those possessions, for an ORtg just under 92. In the two games that included Paul and Capela, the Rockets managed just a 75 ORtg on possessions where Rubio checked Harden. The Spaniard has the potential to really impact this series.

Tactically, Rubio was very brazen about taking away Harden’s left hand whenever the latter was isolated. Watch him sit on Harden’s left side.

The Jazz also selectively tried to force both Harden and Paul away from screens that would get them going toward their strong hand, but they didn’t do it all the time. Here, you can see them “icing,” or having the defender step up against the screener to force Harden or Paul away from the pick. When this happened, the star guards either had to settle for driving in a direction they’re less comfortable with, or let other Rockets had to create.

Other times, Utah would trust its typical pick-and-roll scheme — with Rudy Gobert or Derrick Favors back to contain the drive — even if that meant letting Harden get left. That only worked when the guards made an effort to get in front of Harden as soon as they could so that the bigs didn’t have to guard two guys all the way to the rim. Look at the great effort here by Rubio, Royce O’Neale and Exum to get back in front of Harden/Paul even after going over the screen. This keeps those guys from getting all the way to the rim or drawing the big away from Capela, a constant lob threat.

That’s important because it allows the Jazz to guard the pick-and-roll with 2-on-2 defense, as opposed to involving another helper and letting Harden and Paul set the table for someone else. In game those clips come from, the non-Harden Rockets started out 3-for-21 while Utah built a lead it would never relinquish. If you can keep Harden from the rim without letting others go off, that’s a recipe for success.

Of course, we’ve now seen a couple of ways that Exum impacted the Rockets. He won’t be available this time around, and the Jazz will really miss him. He gives them another way to puncture the defense, and a pesky and long defender to throw at Harden and Paul. Both he and O’Neale have gotten a little over-fouly at times against Harden, but that’s the cost of doing business against one of the game’s best foul drawers. Both of those guys have been good on balance against the Rockets this season, and Exum’s absence will certainly be felt at time.

A word of caution about the “contain” defense, though: both Harden and Paul are really good at snaking back to force the big to switch onto them. Gobert and Favors have had mixed results when they’ve had to step out and guard those guys in space. Favors was superb at it in the December win, but neither guy looked comfortable in the most recent game, a Houston blowout. How the bigs do in those situations will be another major factor in this series.

Transition D & fouls

Transition defense will be a big key for both teams, too. Utah’s two wins against Houston this season game in games that were in the 99th and 94th percentile for transition defense overall. The close loss was in the 89th percentile, but again — Utah just couldn’t turn all those stops into good offense because they kept missing at the rim and on open jumpers.

And of course, you can’t talk about how tactically to stop the Harden-led Rockets without talking about fouling. 

Harden is a master at hunting the contact. If a defender’s arm is out he’ll elevate through that arm to draw contact. On drives, he’ll lean in to create contact with a defender who’s not in a legal guarding position. He’ll go into another guy’s body and get the call, because per the rulebook, that’s a foul unless the defender is completely static — which you just can’t be against Harden. 

And that’s the thing — most of the whistles he gets are completely valid, even if they frustrate opponents and their fans. Yes, like most superstars, he gets some generous calls, too, but mostly he’s just a crazy intelligent guy who knows how to use the rulebook to his advantage. He’s so damn skilled that you have to be glued to him all over the court, and he uses that proximity to initiate contact with off-balance or out-of-position defenders. That is a foul. You might not like it, it might suck to watch, but it’s a foul. A defender who is not static and in legal guarding position can’t impede the offensive player from going where he wants to go.

Plenty of wing creators know this and take roughly the same percentage of their possessions at the free throw line: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Spencer Dinwiddie, Lou Williams and even rookie Luka Doncic¹. Frankly, it’s something Utah’s creators could do better.

But yes, Harden’s parade to the free-throw line will still frustrate the Jazz and their fans. Utah held Harden to 12 free throw attempts in the two wins this season, but allowed 31 in the two losses. It’s a huge key.

The way to avoid giving him free points, of course, is to guard him with your hands back. When guards get beat, they have to trust the help instead of reaching with their upper body. The Jazz spend so much time trying to force him right that sometimes when he gets left they panic. That’s a lot of how he earned FT trips against Exum and O’Neale.

A different series

This Jazz-Rockets series will be unlike 2018. That doesn’t mean the outcome will necessarily be different, but the point of departure for figuring out how these two teams will tactically approach each other has very little to do with last year’s postseason.

Rubio’s presence gives Utah another creation engine and an important defensive option against Harden. And Houston’s personnel changes and defensive shift make one of the central points of analysis from 2018 more-of-less moot. So at the very least, the terms of engagement will be different. It’s almost like playing Monopoly and then moving on to Risk. The games are broadly similar in their premises and objectives, but the pieces are different and winning in one requires slightly different behaviors than winning in the other. 

The board is set. The score is 0-0. And a new game starts Sunday.