Salt City Seven (Plus): Roster Shuffle, Clarkson’s Fit, Road Recap & More

Every week here at SCH, usually on Mondays, we start the week with seven regular features that let us relive the biggest moments, key performances and hot issues in Jazzland from various angles.

This week, life, travel and holidays kicked in and pushed our magical day to Tuesday, which means we’re lumping in an extra day’s worth of Jazz action into this week’s edition. That means that in addition to four games, we also have to spend some time dissecting some December roster moves, including the first in-season NBA trade this year. Let’s go!

“Moving on from (Dante) Exum was difficult for the Jazz… (They) had hopes he would develop into a franchise piece. But, despite his tremendous physical gifts, Exum never put it together.

“At the end of the day, sources say, the Jazz front office felt Exum needed a change of scenery.”

-Plugged-in Tony Jones of The Athletic, on Utah’s Christmas Eve-Eve trade

I usually reserve quote-of-the-week status for Jazz players or personnel. But since nobody from the franchise has commented publicly yet on what rapidly became the week’s biggest story, we’ll use this line from an article by the husting Jones as proxy for what led the front office to move on from a player whose Jazz career has been marked by equal parts promise and frustration¹.

Utah finally moved on from their No. 5 overall pick in the 2014 draft. They traded Exum and two future second-round picks to Cleveland to acquire bench gunner Jordan Clarkson, a move they hope will help a bench unit that struggled to play winning basketball.

On paper, the trade addresses a weakness, at the expense of a player who had fallen from the rotation anyway. Seen through that lense, it seems hard to criticize the trade on the surface.

But the problematic part of this swap for Utah begins long before the December 23 trade call. Sure, they might have salvaged some value for a player who wasn’t getting minutes, but the biggest criticism to be levied here revolves around how they let that player’s value deteriorate in the first place, both as a basketball player and an asset.

Exum was playing some of the best basketball of his career not that long ago. It was in this same calendar year that his improved aggressiveness and decision-making on offense — coupled with his elite on-ball defense — prompted Quin Snyder to declare that he had “turned a corner.” At that point, Exum’s basketball value was as high as it had ever been, and his trade value wasn’t far off. Interested teams asked about Exum around the February trade deadline, which means he was still regarded as a positive asset even after injuring his patellar tendon in late January. 

Ten months ago, in other words, Exum had value to the Jazz. This week, they had to tack on two second-round picks just to trade him for a player with a career total of 2.7 Wins Above Replacement. (More on Clarkson shortly.)

Simply put, the Jazz traded Exum at the worst possible time. They had a player who was contributing on the court and still had value in the NBA marketplace, but instead they waited until they had to bribe a team to take him off their hands.

Exum bears some of that responsibility, too. He hasn’t been consistent enough (in terms of process or outcomes) to earn a steady role over the course of his disjointed Jazz stint. Injuries have obviously been a factor in his mercurial trajectory, but it’s a bit daming that he couldn’t claim minutes in Utah’s struggling bench unit. He’s not off the hook. But neither are the Jazz here, after unloading a distressed asset that just months ago was still positive currency.

Snyder is a fantastic coach, and has an impressive track record of helping players develop. For whatever reason, he just hasn’t had the patience to allow Exum to get back to where he was as a player this time last year. Exum’s stints have gotten shorter and shorter, punctuated by a series of DNP-CDs even when other bench guards and wings were struggling greatly. Snyder appeared to have moved on mentally from Exum even before the trade made it official.

Would it have made a difference if Snyder had given him a longer leash or more opportunities? It’s impossible to know. But here’s what we know for sure: after five and a half seasons of waiting and believing, the Jazz sold low when it came time to move on from Dante Exum. 

So, in comes Clarkson, who gives them a bench scoring punch they haven’t had for years. His 14.6 points per game this season are tied for second among players who have not started a single game. If that number were to hold (it probably won’t), it would be the highest scoring average by a regular non-starter since Thurl Bailey in the late 80s — not counting partial seasons by Rodney Hood and Jeff Hornacek.

But Clarkson brings with him some flaws, too. A defensive standout he’s not, and his efficiency numbers throughout his career indicate that he’s not as much of a plus offensively as the raw numbers make it seem.

We’ll keep talking about Clarkson as we move through the rest of this Salt City Seven. We’ll also touch on other moves by the suddenly transaction-happy Jazz: the club waived Jeff Green on Monday night and then came to a multi-year deal with G League standout Rayjon Tucker.

These moves, in the aggregate, allowed Utah to retool the bench on the fly. So let’s keep talking about this as we head into the “By the Numbers” section.

.534

Clarkson’s career True Shooting figure is well below league average, so — speaking somewhat reductively here — every offensive trip that ends with a Clarkson shooting possession actually makes it harder to assemble a winning offense. Now, some of that might stem from the fact that Clarkson hasn’t really been on good teams. His only experience on a winning ball club came in the partial season he spent with LeBron James in Cleveland. In those 28 games, his TS% was .565 — slightly above average. So maybe being part of a winning ecosystem will help him improve just enough to help the Jazz improve on their 21st-ranked offense. (It’s also worth noting that his TS% this season is .581 through 28 games, although the sample size there might be a little noisy, especially since he has been shooting at a flukey high rate on contested jumpers so far.)

He also doesn’t rate well in defensive all-in metrics, and for the most part that lines up with the eye test. He is primarily an offensive weapon.

437

Green ranked 437 out of 445 NBA players in ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus stat to date this season. He also posted a -8.3 Net Rating during his Jazz tenure, and he cost the Jazz nearly 37 total points of differential based on NBA Math’s Total Points Added stat. It’s hard to find a metric that doesn’t bely his performance as one of the worst of the NBA season thus far among players with regular roles. The Jazz were excited last July to land Green for their bench, but the Georgetown product never really delivered. Ultimately, they decided instead to free up a roster spot to take a swing on a young prospect in Tucker.

38.6%

At 38.6% from beyond the 3-point line, Tucker brings more than just bouncy athleticism to the Jazz. He’s efficient inside and outside the arc, to the tune of .656 True Shooting, a crazy number for a wing. Expect for him to get some run in Utah’s reserve unit. Mike Conley’s continued absence means that whoever occupies that “10th man” spot on the depth chart is going to have some opportunities in the short term.

83

It’s hard to be convinced that the Jazz were terribly invested in getting Exum back to the level he was at last winter when you realize that 83 will be the final tally on Exum’s minutes this season. Even fewer of those minutes were actually meaningful. More than a quarter of his minutes came in garbage time², and he rarely saw the court at all in the second halves of games. Outside of his season debut, he played a grand total of 6:18 second-half minutes, excluding his time at the end of blowouts. Six healthy DNP-CDs, five games where he only saw first-half minutes, and four where his only run after intermission came with the game out of reach. It just doesn’t feel like optimizing the contributions of the former top-five pick was a priority.

Over his final three Jazz campaigns he will have totalled just 982.

50%

The Green deal also appears to create more minutes for Georges Niang, currently one of the Jazz’s best corner 3-point shooters at 50%. Niang has been playing mostly out of position on the wing, and he has struggled there when it comes to the defensive assignments against more fleet-footed small forwards. Now, he’ll have a chance to return to his former role of a true stretch four, and him sliding over on the depth chart is likely how Utah will create minutes for Tucker on the perimeter. This writer’s guess: Tucker and Emmanuel Mudiay will both get burn while Conley is out, and their play during that time will probably dictate which guy stays in the rotation after Utah’s starting guard is healthy.\

Scouting Clarkson

Instead of picking apart a Jazz play from last week, let’s instead look at how Clarkson might fit into Utah’s offense.

One of the things Clarkson does best — and that most matches the way Utah plays — is his ability to shoot off screens out front. A huge chunk of his threes come off actions that are very similar to what Utah uses to free shooters like Bojan Bogdanovic. He likes to catch and shoot while coming toward the ball, as opposed to using “flare screens” that send him away from the passer as the ball is being delivered. Here are three recent plays where he came around screens to get angle threes. Two of these are even hand-off plays, a huge staple in the Jazz offense.

Of course, teams know he’s good at those shots, so good defenses are increasingly putting him on the scouting report and instructing defenders to deny (or “ice”) those screens. Clarkson needs to get better at finding the counters when that happens. If the defense overplays that screen, he will occasionally look for the backdoor cut. But in the Jazz’s system, when that cut isn’t there, they’ll want him to flow right into the next action, most likely an off-ball screen for someone else. That’s not really been how he has played in Cleveland, so we’ll see how he adjusts on the fly, without a training camp to get acclimated.

Clarkson can also attack mismatches if he gets a big switched out on him after a high screen. Many guards around the league view a switch as an opportunity to stage a dribbling exhibition and then launch a long shot over a big who’s hanging back. Clarkson is guilty of that at times, but he also recognizes that he can beat a switch by putting a slower defender on his heels. And when he gets in close, he is able to use his body to get the defender off balance. These three drives all represent pretty smart ways to exploit a mismatch.

These are simple play types where Clarkson can truly just plug-and-play right away with the Jazz. And his shot profile this year is as smart as it has ever been: he has mostly cut the midrange shot from his diet, part of why this is his most efficient season yet in the NBA.

But there will be other ways that Snyder will need to rein him in. He can get a little isolation-happy in certain situations, and some of those ill-advised shots have tugged his percentages down. More than half his shots this season (57%) have been contested tightly or very tightly, per NBA tracking data, and he shoots just 28% on those shots, compared to 41% when he’s relatively open.

He is also a much better 3-point shooter off the catch (42%) than off the bounce (29%), yet he still launches more than two pull-up threes per game. 

There was also some actual basketball played during this Salt City Seven period, including three Jazz wins for which we need to dole out credit in the form of imaginary game balls.

Jazz 109, Magic 102: Donovan Mitchell. The Jazz needed a comeback to put Orlando away, which means it took excellence at both ends to get it done. Rudy Gobert was huge defensively as the Jazz stormed from behind, and Bogdanovic did the lion’s share of the scoring (9) as Utah staged a 19-5 run after falling seven behind. But as we talked about this one on Twitter, it was clear I was overthinking it. Mitchell had the slump-busting dunk that started the run, and was roughly as brilliant as Bogey, with eight points in that final 4:44 stretch. Both guys left the game with 30, but only one can leave with the fake Spalding. Mitchell was also a game-best +19.

Jazz 111, Hawks 106: Donovan Mitchell. I actually thought this one was closer than the popular vote would lead one to believe; Gobert was once again really special in ATL. He had 20 & 13, with three blocks and a number of impressive defensive plays down the stretch as Utah again needed to rally to get back in front, this time to the tune of 20-8. That said, the fourth quarter was Mitchell’s show. He scored 11 of the points in that 20-8 run, part of a 15-point quarter and a 30-5-5 night. He just went and got this one.

Jazz 114, Hornets 107: Rudy Gobert. Take it from someone who was at that game: Gobert made it clear pretty early on that the Hornets had nobody who could deal with him. He had a double-double (11 points, 10 boards) in just nine first-quarter minutes, and that was just a start. He’d finish with 17 points and 19 boards, but the truth is he was way more dominant than that. Hornets guard Devonte Graham tried to take Gobert to the paint over and over and came away empty-handed each time. Graham shot 0-for-5 from two against Gobert, and that doesn’t even count the plays where he couldn’t get a shot off or U-turned away from the paint. Snyder’s fiery tirade was one of the more memorable features of this contest — just his second career ejection — but Gobert was the MVP. Bogey (26 points on 12 shots) and Mitchell (20 points and nine assists) were both also very good.

As we’ve discussed for multiple weeks now, the top of the west is essentially a six-team scrum now that Dallas is looking real enough to be in the conversation. Because of that, whenever two of those teams meet up, it makes for a fun and potentially very important night of basketball.

The LAL-LAC matchup on Christmas Day marks the start of a fun little stretch where those six teams will face each other four times in a little less than a week. Three days after the Tinseltown teams meet up, the Clippers will host the Jazz. Then the night after that, the Mavs will visit the Lakers, and the Rockets will host the Nuggets on New Year’s Eve.

But that’s nothing compared to the last three weeks of January. Check this out (and mark your calendars):

• Nuggets at Mavs, 1/8
• Lakers at Mavs, 1/10
• Clippers at Nuggets, 1/12
• Lakers at Rockets, 1/18
• Clippers at Mavs, 1/21
• Nuggets and Rockets, 1/22
• Mavs at Jazz, 1/25
• Rockets at Nuggets, 1/26
• Rockets at Jazz, 1/27
• Clippers at Lakers, 1/28
• Jazz at Nuggets, 1/30
• Mavs at Rockets, 1/31

A lot could shift based on the outcomes of those 16 games between now and the end of January.

Since the 3-point loss at Miami slipped into the current SC7 period, there are really only two games to preview here:

Thursday 12/26, Jazz vs. Blazers: Utah starts its post-Christmas schedule with a rare TNT game, probably because the schedule-makers and the folks over at Turner thought Portland would be more competitive. Instead, they’re plugging along at 14-17, mired by a jump-shooting offense. They’re fourth worst in the league both in frequency of shots taken at the rim and percentage once they get there, per Cleaning the Glass. Former Jazz wing Rodney Hood is out for the season.

Saturday 12/28, Jazz @ Clippers: The Clippers have the fifth best defense and seventh best offense, and that’s despite the fact that Paul George and Kawhi Leonard have only played together in 14 of LA’s 32 games thus far. They’re 11-3 in those 14 games, a force to be reckoned with. Utah needs to welcome these head-to-head opportunities against the rest of the West’s elite, although the reality is that beating these guys in Staples is a tall order — especially if Conley is still out.

Happy holidays, friends of Salt City Hoops!

Wishing safe and happy holidays to the best fanbase on the internet 💛 pic.twitter.com/A9ZVsoGzP6

— Utah Jazz (@utahjazz) December 25, 2019

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Thanks for reliving another week (and then some) with us. More to come next Monday.