Salt City Seven: Basketball in a Crazy World, Playoff Picture, Patient Conley & More

August 3rd, 2020 | by Dan Clayton

Conley and the Jazz are 1-1 so far during the NBA Restart. (Bill Baptist via espn.com)

Every week during the regular season 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. We put the SC7 on pause along with the rest of the basketball world, but now that the 2019-20 season is officially underway again, it’s time to get back to packaging the quotes, stats, plays and performances that tell the stories from each week in the world of the Jazz.

An important quote from Jazz players or personnel from the week

“We’re in the middle of a ’30 for 30’ to this day. You’re going to look back on it and this is one of the craziest things that’s happened in sports. Not just in sports. This is one of the craziest things that’s happened in the world in our time.”

-All-Star guard Donovan Mitchell

It’s hard to appropriately sum up the peculiar, historic, meaningfully weird nature of the NBA’s now 4-day-old Restart. But Mitchell, speaking to the club website after his team’s blowout loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, did pretty well.

Mitchell is referring here to ESPN’s “30 for 30” feature series that explores some of the biggest and most meaningful stories throughout sports history. And he’s absolutely right: the moment we’re all experiencing right now — as a society, as a country, as a community of sports fans, as humans — is something we’ll eventually look back on and explore. That the NBA factored so prominently into how America came face to face with the 2020 health crisis makes it all the more historically significant that a small town’s worth of basketball folks have converged in a few gyms in Orlando to crown a champion and entertain a weary world a little.

What’s happening now at Disney’d Wide World of Sports complex in Central Florida is absolutely a part of this weird chapter of national and even world history now. It is representative of how we’re all trying — despite trepidation, risks, and a sheen of weirdness covering everything — to inch back toward normalcy. With a bajillion precautions and limitations we never would have imagined six months ago. The NBA is now centrally involved in how America lost its innocence and naivete where the coronavirus is concerned, and in the story of how we began to slowly, cautiously construct a new normal.

And if it weren’t enough for basketball to occupy such an important crux point in the way the pandemic and life after it have unfolded, that’s not even the only unique historical context to which these games belong.

NBA (and Jazz) players have chosen to leverage their platform and these games as an important to weigh in on important social issues that have come to the forefront after several weeks of demonstrations about racial justice and the treatment of people of color by police and other institutions. The volume of the discussion around these issues is perhaps at its highest pitch since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but if you listen carefully to what many black Americans are telling the rest of us right now, it’s not like the issues of discrimination and bias ever went away. It’s an important opportunity for all of us to to listen with empathy and decide what version of society we want to help build. At the same time, it’s a highly unusual backdrop for these 88 seeding games and the subsequent NBA postseason.

Most Jazz fans have been highly supportive of players and coaches using their platform to call attention to these social issues. Some haven’t, and that’s part of why this is such an important moment in the national discourse around race and equality. One fan started a Twitter handle for Jazz Fans Against Racism, and has used the feed to share some thoughtful videos that invite fans to reflect on their own emotional response to the unrest. (This has been my favorite so far, a humble and well-researched video. “These are patriotic qualities, too.”) How cool would it be if the Jazz community — a fan base that has been, fairly or not, judged by a few high-profile incidents — really embraced this opportunity to listen, learn, and spread messages of equality? It would send a nice message if that Twitter account’s following ballooned.

Back to Mitchell’s point, that’s the backdrop for the NBA’s Restart. That’s why this historically unqiue basketball setting is happening in a historically unique way during a historically unique year. We’re obviously all interested in the way the actual games will unfold in that 94-by-50 rectangle. But Mitchell’s right that this is absolutely bigger than that, and part of the narrative of this bizarre chapter in our shared narrative, still taking shape before our eyes.

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

OK, back to the actual basketball…

Utah’s 1-1 week cost them in their hunt for prime playoff seeding, especially since the loss came to one of the teams nipping at their heels in the Western Conference standings.

In fact, Houston leapfrogged both the Jazz and Thunder with a 2-0 start, aided by James Harden’s 37-8-8 averages. The Thunder inched ever closer to the Jazz with their blowout win on Saturday, and they also laid claim to the season series tiebreaker.

Here’s a reset on the Western Conference playoff picture as a whole.

Going into Monday 8/3.

Thoughts:

  • The Lakers only need one win to clinch the top spot, and the Clippers can lock up No. 2 just by defeating Denver and their three remaining sub-.500 opponents. So the Tinseltown teams will in all likelihood remain at the top here.
  • Denver is up just a game on the Jazz and Rockets, and has the toughest schedule of anybody in the 1-through-7 race. (Poor Memphis).
  • Houston’s has an easy remaining schedule and will likely own the division winner tiebreaker, so they are in good shape in terms of keeping a top-4 seed.
  • Since homecourt isn’t a real factor in this year’s playoffs, you could make the case that finishing fourth is worse than finishing sixth. The macro quality at seeds three through six is so close that a first-round matchup is likely going to be tough no matter which seed you are, but the winner of the 3-6 matchup would at least avoid the Lakers in round two. It will be interesting to see if anybody appears to be engineering the standings down the stretch.
  • At this point, a play-in between Nos. 8 and 9 is more likely than not. 
  • Remember, tiebreakers will really only be relevant among the Jazz, Thunder and Rockets — and the Clippers, in the unlikely event that they slip up.

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

15

Utah’s 15 first-quarter points against the Thunder on Saturday marked their lowest-scoring period of the season so far, and they weren’t even done struggling on the offensive end. Per stats site Cleaning the Glass, Utah’s non-garbage time ORtg for the game (91.7) was one of their four worst offensive outings of the year. Interestingly, their worst offensive performance of the year (87.0 back in December) also came against the Thunder.

21%

One thing the Bubble Jazz are doing well: they’re turning over their opponents far more than they did in the previous 64 regular season games. The Pels ended 20.8% of their possessions on Thursday night with a turnover, followed by 21.7% for the Thunder, both figures in the top six percent of all NBA games played this season. Utah came into the Restart ranked 27th in opponent turnover percentage, so that’s one nice positive trend to keep an eye on.

+24.9

Utah’s new starting five — Mitchell, Mike Conley, Joe Ingles, Royce O’Neale and Rudy Gobert — now have a +24.9 Net Rating for the season, even after getting outplayed (-9.5 per 100 possessions) by Oklahoma City’s starters. This is a promising stat that shows how Utah can weather the storm without injured sharpshooter Bojan Bogdanovic, especially when rotations eventually tighten as the playoffs approach.

-16.9 to -44.8

The flip side, of course, is that Utah’s bench has, um, not been good. All four of the Jazz’s regular reserves have double-digit negative Net Ratings in the bubble. Emmanuel Mudiay has the best (or least bad, anyway) at -16.9, while Tony Bradley has posted a -44.8. Jordan Clarkson has scored a bunch, but on efficiency that is far below average, and his defense has been next-level bad in Disney World. And Georges Niang suddenly can’t make shots, easily his best NBA skill. Quin Snyder gave Juwan Morgan a chance on Saturday night, albeit in a blowout. Of the deep reserves, Morgan seems most likely to get a chance to crash the rotation. He has 81 NBA minutes to his name, but if the bench continues to struggle the way they are now, eventually the door will crack open for somebody.

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

This is less of an X-and-O breakdown this week, and more a scouting perspective on a particular player. Conley is obviously going to have the ball in his hands a lot more as the Jazz cope with Bogdanovic’s absence, and he’s going to have to play a huge role for Utah to be competitive in the postseason.

The good news, Jazz fans, is that Conley is looking healthy, under control, and — as we’ll show you here — patient.

Patient Conley Hanging on a Pivot

When Conley missed an extended period of time, Mitchell and Ingles were the Jazz’s two main pick-and-roll practitioners. Mitchell is dymamic and versatile in attacking pick-and-roll defenses, but sometimes opponents can speed up his decision-making and force him into making a bad read. This happened on Saturday night, one game after he had a superb performance picking apart the Pelicans. And Ingles, while incredibly savvy, simply has a more limited bag in terms of the ways he can punish a particular pick-and-roll scheme. 

Enter Conley. He’s not as athletic as Mitchell and he can’t see over the defense like the 6-foot-8 Ingles, but aside from that, he’s a perfect blend of the two as a handler in P&R play. Like Mitchell, he’s a varied finisher who’s comfortable with either hand in close, and like Ingles, he is great at reading defenses and buying himself a beat to react.

Take these two drives. Watch as he hangs on a pivot both times to freeze defenders and find a crack he can slide through.

That’s not “athletic” in the way we usually think of that term, but that kind of below-the-rim wizardry, suspending time and space to stretch yourself out past a defender, is just as impressive as leaping over the top of someone.

It also requires a Hardenesque understanding of gather rules. He actually steps right-left-right after his last dribble, but the way the rules are written, he’s still considered a dribbler until he gathers right before the left foot comes down. That enables him to legally hang on the left foot — legally his pivot foot — for a second until he eventually lengthens his stride with the right foot to slide around a defender he had gotten to flinch. In real-time, this looks like too many steps, but it’s not. He’s just smartly keeping his dribble alive until he’s well below the free throw line, then patiently probing past a jumpy defender.

The second play in this video is similar, even though it’s harder to see where exactly he gathers. What you can see is Frank Jackson (Clarkson’s defender) sagging lower to make sure Conley — a lefty, but excellent with his right hand in close — can’t cut back to the middle and get to his right hand. But there’s a nanosecond during which Jackson’s head swivels back to Clarkson, and that’s when Conley attacks the seam. His pivot foot is the right foot now, and he has already taken a step towards the baseline with his left foot, but he’s legally allowed to take a second step with the right (as long as he keeps his pivot foot planted) to get into the middle.

These are just super smart plays, the result of thousands of reps endowing Conley with both a radar-like feel for where the defenders are and a reflexive understanding of how he can legally contort himself laterally to use the space.

That’s the only way Conley’s supreme patience has been on display this week. Here’s a bonus play, this time out on the perimeter. 

This is supposed to be a staggered screen to bring Conley to the ball, but Conley doesn’t quite like the separation he gets on the Ingles part of the double-screen, so he stops briefly to fake his defender into giving him some space before he uses the Gobert screen. Now his defender has to go under the pick, so Conley could just catch and fire, but he is patient enough to let Gobert flip the screen. And even then, he doesn’t shoot right away, but lets the defender fly by him before taking a more comfortable attempt.

Three times in the span of about four seconds, Conley instinctively makes these subtle little decisions to buy himself more time and space.

That’s just a smart, patient dude with the basketball.

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

Jazz 106, Pelicans 104: Royce O’Neale.

Twitter votes poured in for five different Jazz players, all with pretty solid cases. Most of the support went to Mitchell and Gobert, understandably. Mitchell took over late, scoring seven of the Jazz’s final nine points, and setting up Gobert for the other two, game-winning free throws with six seconds left. Gobert was also superb in the defensive paint, limiting the Pels to 1-for-7 shooting at the rim when he was nearby and leading the Jazz with an insane 86.8 DRtg. But I went another direction, because this was the perfect game to get the criminally underdiscussed O’Neale on the Game Ball board. His DRtg (89.5) was just a notch behind Gobert’s, and that’s with a bunch of tough assignments. Per tracking, he spent 74% of his time at the defensive end guarding New Orleans’ toughest matchups: Brandon Ingram, Zion Williamson and Jrue Holiday. Beyond that, he did all the stuff the Jazz need from him on offense: jump shots, show-and-go drives, moving without the ball, etc. Add in nine boards and three assists, and it was just a perfect O’Neale game. 

A quick look ahead at Utah’s next seven nights of action.

Six seeding games remain for the Jazz, who are currently in the No. 5 spot, but just a half game ahead of the Thunder, who own the tiebreaker. This week, they have their only back-to-back (and their only 4-games-in-6-nights) of the Restart.

Monday 8/3, 7:00 p.m. MDT, Jazz vs. Lakers (ESPN): The Lakers are still a bit light in the point guard department, but they need just one win in their final six games (or any Clipper loss) to lock up the top seed in the West. Anthony Davis and LeBron James were both questionable heading into Saturday’s matchup with the Raptors, and then Davis went on to have an off night, with 2-for-7 shooting in the blowout loss. The Laker stars are expected to play against Utah, and that makes this one an undeniably tough outing for the Jazz, who lack the size to bother the supersized Lakers. Utah mostly plays with four guards surrounding Gobert, while L.A. has been running with James as the de facto point guard. There’s a reason Utah is 0-2 against the Lake Show this season — and that was with Bogdanovic, who’s no defensive ace but at least gives the Jazz another big body.

Wednesday 8/5, 12:30 p.m. MDT, Jazz vs. Grizzlies:  DAY GAME! It has been a tough Restart for Memphis, despite getting 27 points per game from Jaren Jackson Jr. and another 23.5 from Ja Morant. Their two young studs notwithstanding, Memphis has lost twice, both times to teams looking to knock them off the eighth seed. That said, JJJ is looking splendid. He’s scoring from inside (10ppg in the paint) and out (40% on 3s), and he’s one of seven players in the league averaging at least 1.5 blocks and 1.5 steals so far in the Restart. The Jazz will also see 2018 draftee Grayson Allen; Justise Winslow’s absence means Allen has been seeing more consistent playing time.

Friday 8/7, 11:00 a.m. MDT, Jazz vs. Spurs: Another day game for the Jazz, and the first of two remaining matchups against the LaMarcus Aldridge-less Spurs. San Antonio has had a decent Disney experience, though, with two wins against teams they’ll need to beat to have a shot at playing into the playoff bracket (Kings and Grizzlies). Right now they are in the pole position to hang onto No. 9 and have a chance to beat Memphis twice and get into the postseason. DeMar DeRozan has been doing his usual damage, and Derrick White (averaging 21-7-6) has stood out as well.

Friday 8/8, 1:30 p.m. MDT, Jazz vs. Nuggets (TNT): This weekend matinee is probably the Jazz’s most important game of the whole Restart, at least if their goal is to move up at all. As we discussed in last week’s SC7, the fact that Utah and Denver will land on different game totals for the season gives Utah a unique advantage to catching the Nuggets: all they’d need to do is win this game and not lose any more than Denver loses in their other six. (In other words, if Denver finishes 4-3 including a loss to the Jazz, Utah only needs 3-3 to surpass them.) That said, Denver has won both previous meetings. Nikola Jokic-Gobert matchups are always fun, and somebody will need to stop Jamal Murray, who had 31 the last time these teams met.

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

That’s it for this one! A lot of Jazz basketball coming your way this week, and we’ll be back Monday with more Salt City Seven.

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