Salt City Seven: Offense Hurting the D, Bench Troubles Continue & More

Paint precision has been an issue lately, and it’s costing the Jazz on the other end, too. (Garrett Ellwood via espn.com)

Every week here at SCH begins with the Salt City Seven: seven regular features that let us relive the biggest moments, key performances and hot issues in Jazzland from various angles. Check in every week for the quotes, stats, plays and performances that tell the stories from the last 168 hours in the world of the Jazz.

An important quote from Jazz players or personnel from the week

“When you don’t finish, its very difficult to defend. If you turn the ball over, it’s very difficult to defend. And then there were a number of times when we didn’t run back as hard as we needed to. It’s that simple.”

-Quin Snyder on Utah’s recent struggles with transition defense

This quote came from Snyder’s postgame presser after Wednesday’s loss to the Lakers, but in reality it could have easily come from a half dozen different games. This has been a recurring issue all season, and it’s the reason the Jazz defense has fallen from elite to ordinary.

For the year, Jazz opponents add 2.8 points to their offensive rating (excluding garbage minutes and heaves) through transition opportunities, a figure that ranks just worse than league average. But part of that stat is the 2.5 extra points the Jazz’s opponents add per 100 possessions JUST off of live turnovers. That is the second-worst mark in the league, per the indispensable stats site Cleaning the Glass. Only six teams allow more of their own turnovers to turn into transition opportunities, and only one allows more points on those possessions.

In other words, for the Jazz’s defense to have a chance, their offense needs to be more precise.

That was the case in Wednesday’s loss to the Lakers, when the Jazz lost the ball 18 times, including 13 to live Laker steals. Utah also missed more than half it’s shots at the rim, and missed layups are dangerous because they can often lead to points in the other direction. The Lakers added 8.2 points to their ORtg that night just off Utah’s misses. That was the worst job Utah has done all year of limiting transition off misses.

When transition defense is that leaky, it almost doesn’t matter how good you are in halfcourt play. Per 100 possessions, the Jazz spotted an elite team 11 points that night just by not being as sharp as they could be on offense — well, and not racing back when something went wrong.

This is an issue that is holding the Jazz back defensively. They’ve now had just five games where their halfcourt defense for the night was in the worst 40% of all games this NBA season, and yet they’ve had a whopping 13 games where their transition defense failed them. This is the reason why the vaunted Utah defense, perennially a top-3 outfit in that department under Snyder, is currently languishing in 11th place.

And what’s crazy here is that the solution isn’t to play better defense: it’s to execute the offense better, with more precision. 

Jazz forward Joe Ingles was right when he suggested this week that the team will always have some passing turnovers because of the way they move the ball on offense. But certain types of live turnovers are the result of poor decision-making, not a systemic predilection for passing. For example, the Jazz often get caught getting too casual on simple passes out front. Defenses know that pass is coming, so if you’re simply going through the motions and making that pass based on muscle memory instead of paying attention to what the defense is doing, it’s an easy one to pick off. And since it happens out front, it’s almost always a score going the other direction.

The other turnovers the Jazz need to cut out are the wild backward passes that result from a driver getting too far without a plan. Almost all of the club’s ball handlers have been guilty of this one, especially those who attack most often, like leading scorers Donovan Mitchell and Bojan Bogdanovic. They get caught in the air and throw the ball back out toward the other team’s hoop, so when those passes are picked off, they’re practically transition assists to the other team.

Teams are still mindful of the “floater range.”

And then of course there are all the paint misses. The Jazz are currently 15th in the league in converting rim opportunities, 27th in what CTG calls “short mid,” which is essentially paint non-restricted, or what Jazz fans might recognize as the floater zone. Those shots aren’t going away; the Jazz staff believe that’s an important ingredient to keeping pick-and-roll defenses honest, and it often is. Check out the still to the right: if teams weren’t concerned about Mitchell’s available to score in the short mid area, they wouldn’t commit three defenders to wall off his drive here, and Gobert wouldn’t be wide open under the rim.

But Utah could limit its diet of this kind of shot. Only three teams get more of their shots from four to 14 feet than the Jazz, and the tendency to stop short also means they’re below average (19th) at getting to the rim.

So it’s not as easy as “don’t turn the ball over” or “stop taking floaters.” But Utah’s decision-making on offense is, weirdly, the key to getting their defense back into the top five. 

Stats that tell the story of the week or highlight a timely topic

-8.1

Per SCH contributor and general basketball smart guy Riley Gisseman, the Jazz have a major problem right now in terms of bench play. Heading into the Memphis game on Saturday, the Jazz were beating opponents by 11.5 points per 100 possessions whenever they had five of their main six guys playing: Mitchell, Bogdanovic, Ingles, Rudy Gobert, Mike Conley and Royce O’Neale. But all lineups involving even a single player outside that six have a combined Net Rating of -8.1. 

In other words, the Jazz bench is a major problem right now. Jeff Green and Emmanuel Mudiay had nice nights on Saturday, so that stat would look slightly better now. But one of the puzzles Snyder has been trying to solve all season is how to manage the rotation so that those bench minutes are more tenable. He has tried staggering all five of his starters so that they come back in to help steady the bench unit, and it hasn’t made much of a difference. The Jazz need better play from a group that includes Green, Mudiay, Ed Davis, Dante Exum and Georges Niang.

22

Back to Ingles’ point about the Jazz’s sharing ideology resulting in some amount of turnovers… Utah beat Memphis partially by sharing a season-high 32 assists. But the Jazz also turned over 22 possessions, their second highest total of the season. Yet they were able to win by double digits. The Jazz are actually 4-1 in games this season where they have committed 20 or more turnovers¹. In other words, some amount of risk is inherent if you’re going to make the types of passes that can result in an offensive advantage. The risk-reward calculus just needs to be better. 

2:32

That’s the total of non-garbage time minutes Exum has played in the second halves of the last 10 Jazz games. He drew a DNP-CD in Milwaukee, saw only first-half action against Minnesota, GSW, New Orleans, Memphis and Philly, and didn’t get off the pine until garbage time against Indiana, Toronto and the latest Memphis game. The Laker game is the only time since his season debut that he had gotten on the court after intermission but before the white flag was thrown, and that was just for 2:32.

Snyder is also back to giving the Australian guard those weirdly short stints that Exum alone seems to frequently get. Starting with the game against the Pels, Exum’s non-garbage time runs have equaled 5:09, 4:23, 6:40, 2:27, 1:41, 1:15 and :31 — an average of just over three minutes per appearance. To be clear, he largely hasn’t played well, outside of some isolated moments here and there. But it’s hard to show much, or establish any sort of feel in three-minute stints.

Take Mudiay, for example. The reserve guard had a rough first quarter on Saturday. He missed defensive assignments, drove into crowds without a plan, and turned the ball over. But Snyder stuck with him, and Mudiay rewarded that patience with one of his nicest games of the season. He had 11 points and seven assists for the game, and helped the Jazz pull away from Memphis. For whatever reason, Exum hasn’t been given that same leeway recently. He obviously needs to take responsibility for ensuring that he’s ready to contribute as soon as his sneakers hit the hardwood, but it might help if he occasionally had the same runway that others in the rotation are given. 

Breaking down the Xs and Os behind a Jazz score from the week

I couldn’t decide which play to highlight, so this week you get two X-and-O breakdowns, both from Saturday’s win.

Iverson DHO w/ baseline flare

What makes this play is the timing. Watch how Bogey doesn’t start moving into O’Neale’s baseline flare screen until Gobert has already pitched the ball to Ingles on his “Iverson” route across the top. This simultaneous action occupies four defenders and limits the helping options. The cumulative effect of the play essentially makes this like a sideways “hammer” action. Hammer is the name for the play when a ball handler drives baseline while a simultaneous weakside cutter mirrors his drive and make for the weak corner. 

Another subtlty here: watch O’Neale change the angle on the pick. Jae Crowder tries to cheat over the pick to the high side, apparently thinking Bogey is going to want to curl around on the catch. But O’Neale makes a heads-up play when he sees that coming. He steps out and makes his screen a little higher, and Bogey recognizes that the angle of Crowder’s pursuit and O’Neale’s pick means he has the corner shot open if he wants it.

Then, a few minutes later…

Pick-and-seal for baseline dunk

The Jazz ran this a lot for O’Neale last season, but basically whoever is the weakside spacer can get this baseline drive about as frequently as the Jazz go looking for it.

In most defensive schemes, it’s the weak corner defender’s responsibility to “tag” the roll man, which is why you see Solomon Hill go all the way to the paint to show on Gobert. For P&R ball handlers, this is a pretty basic read; they know that’s the most likely place help is coming from, so as soon as they see an extra body, they know to look for the pass to the corner. Now Hill has to choose to either run Ingles off the 3-point line by closing out frantically, or prevent the drive but concede an open jumper. He chooses the former.

But it’s Gobert’s read that makes the play here. Watch the play again and keep your eyes on him. Even before Royce lets the pass go, Gobert has made the same read, and he knows that his primary job now is to seal the baseline for Ingles. He isn’t rolling to score here, he’s rolling with the primary intent of preventing a help defender from sliding over.

Both plays have a common feature in common: in both scenarios, Jazz players with and without the ball make the same read simultaneously, moving and acting with hive brain to leverage an advantage.

After each Jazz win, Twitter helps us decide who was that game’s MVP or most memorable performer

The Jazz’s recent struggles lingered into their return home, resulting in a third straight loss before they righted the ship against a shorthanded Grizzlies squad on Saturday. That means we have only one Game Ball to give out this week.

Jazz 126, Grizzlies 112: Joe Ingles. Jeff Green got silly hot in the first half in what was undoubtedly his best Jazz game yet: 19 points, 5-for-6 from three, +22, all season bests. And yet somehow he wasn’t the hero of this one. That would be Ingles, who took the helm of the Jazz offense with Mike Conley hurt and dished 10 assists, the first double-digit assist night by a Jazz player this season. He also had four steals and a dozen points, and the Jazz outscored Memphis by 23 during his minutes, lost by nine when he sat. But more than anything, it was the way the Jazz finally got a core part of their identity working again. The ball movement was exquisite, and the Jazz’s effective field goal percentage was in the top 1% of all games by all teams this NBA season as a result (per Cleaning the Glass).

Gobert (5 assists, 19-and-11 double-double) and Green were the other finalists here, while Mitchell (22) and Bogdanovic (19) did their usual thing. Mudiay (11 points, 7 assists) and O’Neale (perfect shooting, 14 points) had nice nights, too.

Tracking the wild Western Conference postseason race and the Jazz’s place in it

The chasm is widening between the top six — the L.A. teams, Houston, Denver, Utah and now Dallas — and the rest of the West.

Both FiveThirtyEight’s model and the recently unveiled projections at Basketball Reference have the Jazz looking up at the other five teams in that upper echelon. Obviously that’s after the Jazz’s pendulum swung pretty hard one way after a rough patch of schedule and slumpy play left them 1-5 before Saturday’s slump-buster. All six of those teams will similarly have peaks and valleys, so the exact order within that group will likely be fluid over the course of the next four months.

One team that is looking ever more real: the Lakers. They are the only Western Conference team with a top-five offense and defense, and they’ve now won 14 of 15. The only knock on them had been their relatively soft schedule, but they answered that concern when they went on the road to Denver, Utah and Portland and came away with three wins by an average of 19 points. Then they got home and hammered the Timberwolves by 17 behind a 50-piece from Anthony Davis.

They are looking as hungry, talented and motivated as anybody in the conference.

A quick look at the Jazz’s next seven nights of action

The Jazz will cram in three games before having both weekend days off — giving you a chance to finish (start?) your holiday shopping.

Monday 12/9, Jazz vs. Thunder: OKC has quitely won five of its last seven, thanks in large part to the 19.7 points they’ve gotten from Dennis Schröder over that stretch. Utah gets a bit of a schedule advantage in this one, though, as the Thunder will come to them on the second half of the dreaded back-to-back with eastward travel, after beating the Blazers in Portland on Sunday night. Also, the Jazz better keep their jerseys tucked in on Monday night; Chris Paul got a lot of attention last week when he successfully lobbied a referee to call a delay-of-game technical with 1.1 seconds to go in a one-possession game. The free point got the Thunder close enough that Paul could then force overtime with a cherry-picking layup, and they eventually won the game. The NBA: where amazing happens.

Wednesday 12/11, Jazz @ Timberwolves: The sliding Wolves have lost four straight, and six of eight since they scored an upset win in Salt Lake City on November 18. Karl-Anthony Towns is averaging 24, 11 and 6 over that stretch, but Minny’s DRtg with KAT on the floor over the last eight games is a team-worst 122.6. That should be interesting context for the net installment of the always interesting KAT-Gobert matchup, which stands at 1-1 so far this season.

Friday 12/13, Jazz vs. Warriors: D’Angelo Russell is back for Golden State, but doesn’t quite look like himself yet at 12.5 points per game in his first two games after the injury. Until he gets right, this Warriors team is still a team relying heavily on Mitchell’s childhood friend Eric Paschall (17.1 ppg), as well as former Jazzman Alec Burks (15.0 ppg). In other words, injuries are taking their toll and then some on the once-mighty Dubs. Golden State ranks second-worst in effective field goal percentage and dead last in point differential.

Because after all, following a basketball team is supposed to be fun

The Jazz needed all the help they could get after losing five of six. And they got it, from a galaxy far, far away.

I’m not sure where the idea originated to use Baby Yoda — from Disney’s popular Mandalorian series — as the good luck charm for Jazz Nation, but Twitter’s @jazzy_jkp led the charge. He created several different images of the adorable Jedi master-to-be, each claid in a different Jazz jersey. And before long, a huge portion of Jazz Twitter was rocking these images as their avis.

Jazz Twitter rn: pic.twitter.com/u7o34ppl1K

— JAZZ Uruguay 🇺🇾🏀 (@UtahJazzUruguay) December 5, 2019

Gobert even included a No. 27-wearing Baby Yoda in his Instagram story.

Mission accomplish. The force is strong with this one.

Another seven days in the books! Check back next Monday, and follow along with our great team of writers in the meantime.