Quick Thoughts As Mitchell Explodes Again, Utah Goes Up 3-1

Mitchell’s second 50-point performance of these playoffs helped put Utah up 3-1. (Garrett Ellwood via espn.com)

The Utah Jazz jumped out to a commanding 3-1 series lead against the Denver Nuggets on Sunday night, as star guard Donovan Mitchell powered them to a 129-127 win with his second fifty-plus scoring performance of the playoffs.  Both he and Denver guard Jamal Murray were superb down the stretch, and consequently the score stayed within a two-possession margin for the entire final five minutes. But a Mitchell three just inside the final minute put Utah up by four, and the Jazz were able to protect that lead with 7-of-8 free throw shooting in those final 60 seconds. Utah now stands one win from advancing to the Western Conference semifinals for the third time in four seasons.

Here are some quick reactions to Utah’s third straight win.

What’s left for Denver to try defensively? When the Nuggets have dropped center Nikola Jokic in pick-and-roll coverage, Mitchell has danced right past him for a pair of 50-point games. When they’ve brought Jokic up to show on the ball in Game 3, Rudy Gobert and others lived at the rim in a 37-point Jazz win. We’ve seen Denver employ some soft-trapping, hard-trapping, icing, some seleective switching and pre-switching… None of it has appeared to make the Jazz even slightly uncomfortable.

It would be hard to overstate just how much Utah has had Denver’s number on offense. The Jazz haven’t had a game with a non-garbage time offensive rating of less than 120 in this series, per Cleaning the Glass. Even if you just look at halfcourt offensive possessions (taking out all transition play), Utah has scored 123 points per 100 possessions. That’s the best among all playoff teams by a ridiculous margin. The next best team (Milwaukee) is exactly 17 points back in terms of halfcourt efficiency in these playoffs. It’s just bonkers how easy Utah has been scoring against Denver’s set defense.

A lot of that comes down to Mitchell just cooking at a historic level. You already heard that he joined Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson as the only players to pour in 50-plus twice in the same series, but also: only four players before Mitchell had multiple *career* 50-point playoff games. Mitchell has had two in a week, and his playoff True Shooting is at a ridiculous .743. He has just been picking apart Denver and controlling games at a level that should be extremely exciting for Jazz fans.

But Utah’s offensive groove goes way beyond one player’s historic outburst. More to the point, the Nuggets have tried enough coverages that it’s not clear if they can scheme their way out of this with some new gambit. They could shift individual assignments, reallocate minutes, and otherwise adjust from a personnel standpoint — like getting Gary Harris back, for example, if he’s ready to go before time runs out on Denver. But from a game plan standpoint, the Jazz have confounded every type of coverage the Nuggets have thrown at them. I’m just not sure what’s left for Denver to try to slow down the Jazz.

Obviously Mitchell won’t shoot like this forever. Similary, Jordan Clarkson and Mike Conley have had flames coming out of their fingertips. So some amount of random shot variance could boomerang Utah’s efficiency back toward the mean at some point. But this isn’t just a triumph of random shot luck; Utah is just getting what it wants, with 72% of the team’s shots coming at the rim or from deep in this series. It has just been too easy for Utah to get into the paint at will, and Denver has too many minus defenders, which has enabled the Jazz to just dissect coverages once Denver reacts to guards getting where they want to go.

It’s been a good old-fashioned butt-kicking on that end of the court, and I’m not sure what Denver has left to try to slow the Jazz down.

Battle of the bigs. We knew this series would revolve around Jokic and Gobert to a large degree, and it’s getting harder to argue that Jokic has enjoyed a great deal of success against his Utah counterpart, unless you limit the argument to the rawest of raw counting stats.

Yes, Jokic has so far lapped Gobert in terms of accumulating box scores stats: he’s averaging 25-8-5 (to Gobert’s 19-10-1) as Denver continues to run most of its offense through the gifted center. But Jokic’s overall efficiency is down, and since the Jazz have been trusting Gobert to handle Jokic largely one-on-one, other Nuggets still aren’t feasting off of the defensive attention the Denver big is capable of attracting. Jokic still hasn’t had a single game in these playoffs where his assist total reached his regular season average, and Denver is a fairly ho-hum 21-19 across regular season and playoff games when Jokic registers six assists or less. 

For Gobert’s part, he has actually seen his usage rate creep up in the postseason, while keeping his league-leading efficiency (.711 True Shooting in the playoffs after putting up .699 in the regular year). Again, Denver’s very pliable defense has allowed the Jazz to soften up the interior and get the ball to Gobert more often. Imagine if Gobert were also making his free throws (.478). Even if he were just hitting his career rate from the line, the extra point per game would push his scoring average past 20 for the series.

Jokic is an excellent player, and he has had stretches where he has gotten what he wanted even against the long, pesky Gobert. But at the macro level, Gobert is winning the war, especially where it matters most: Gobert is +13.4 per 100 possessions in this series, Jokic is exactly -13.4.

Respect these Nuggets… offensively. That said, Denver still deserves a lot of respect, especially at the top of their roster. Jokic is still a multi-talented offensive beast who serves as the fulcrum to a top-five defense that Utah, frankly, has struggled to slow down. And Murray has been ridiculously good in the two close games.

Murray has set new playoff career highs twice in this series, including on Sunday night when he hit 50 in the loss. Hit shot-making ability, especially on P&R pull-ups, makes it tough for Utah to deny everything when he and Jokic team up in the two-man game. The Jazz have been bringing more help in some situations, including by having Gobert stay with Murray for an extra beat until the guards fully recover. But holding Gobert there for an extra half second comes at a cost, especially since both Jokic and Murray have excellent court vision and can instantly recognize where the defense is softer as a result.

Add all that up, and Denver is really hard to guard, They’re getting 104.3 points per 100 halfcourt possessions, which would be a pretty impressive number if Utah weren’t at 123.2. Denver has been one of the hottest playoff teams from three (second best, behind only Utah) and from midrange (fifth best, behind Utah and three others). In other words, Utah’s defense has hardly been impenetrable either, and Murray and Jokic have had a lot to do with why the Jazz have had to live with certain stuff. Denver has just been giving up so much on defense that it largely hasn’t mattered how good they’ve been at scoring the ball.

Let’s put it this way: in Game 4, Utah got another 51 from Mitchell, plus 50 combined from Conley and Clarkson and an efficient double-double from Gobert, and still only won by a bucket. 

If you haven’t come away from this series with a lot more respect for Murray and with a renewed appreciation for what Jokic is capable of offensively, it’s probably because you just don’t want to.

Briefly: Utah is dead last in the postseason at generating transition opportunities off of Denver’s live misses and turnovers, but they’re scoring nearly 1.42 points per play when they do get out and run. That figure is second-best. If they do advance and face teams who are, um, better defensively, they’ll likely need to turn some of those rebounds and steals into opporutnities for easy buckets…

The weird phenomenon continues where Joe Ingles seems to play less aggressive in games where Conley is available. After averaging 18.5 in the first two, Ingles has taken just six shots since the proud papa returned — and missed all of them. Obviously he facilitates less pick-and-roll action when Conley is available as a second ball-handler behind Mitchell. And he does a lot of other stuff for Utah besides scoring, including on the defensive end where he has accepted the challenge of guarding everybody from Murray to the barrell-chested Paul Millsap. He’s even had to check Jokic on a not insignificant number of switches. But at this point it’s just uncanny how seldom the Jazz have been able to get good games from both of their veteran facilitators…

Clarkson has been a big help in this series, even beyond his four straight double-digit scoring games. Utah’s cross-matching on defense has left Clarkson with some awkward defensive assignments, like guarding the much larger Jerami Grant. He has been able to do enough defensively to hold his own, and his scoring chops have helped the Jazz, especially in games 2 and 4 when he scored more efficiently. The Jazz entered the playoffs needing a lot from Clarkson, and it was fair to worry how that would turn out. Clarkson had only been involved in one postseason before, and it didn’t go that well: he defended poorly, shot inefficiently, and virtually all of his macro impact stats were in the negative in that lone playoff run with the Cavs. His second foray into the postseason has been far better, and the Jazz probably don’t win Game 4 in particular without him.

Up next: Game 5 finally has a scheduled tip-off time: 6:30 p.m. EDT / 4:30 p.m. MDT. If Utah wins that one, they’ll have a few days to await the winner of Clippers-Mavericks as their second round opponent (that series is tied 2-2). If they fall shrot on Tuesday, they’ll have two more chances to score a series-clinching win: Thursday and Saturday.