Elite Clippers, Jazz Square Off in Battle of Wills

Can Gobert’s Jazz slow down the versatile Clippers? (Alex Goodlett)

Let’s call Jazz-Clippers what it is: a battle of heavyweights. The two teams that will tip off a best-of-seven series tonight in Salt Lake City emerged from the pack with the NBA’s two best Net Ratings, SRS marks and adjusted efficiency differentials. The Jazz won 72% of their games despite guard injuries plaguing their final month. The Clippers dealt with their own revolving door of injuries, but were 32-11 (.744) any time All-Stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George both played.

Utah’s about to feel a huge jump in opponent quality. That’s no knock on the Memphis Grizzlies, who competed, showcased their blossoming talent, and kept every game interesting until a Game 5 blowout. It just is what it is: in a conference with a pretty big standings gap after No. 7, the Jazz earned the right to start with the one Western playoff team that wasn’t quite like the others. And then they took care of business, trailing for just 4.2% of the minutes in the series (and just 0.7% of the second-half minutes) after Donovan Mitchell returned to the lineup.

Now that part of the Jazz postseason is over. Just about every macro rating says the same thing: the teams still standing are the league’s seven best teams — OK, and Atlanta¹. And the best of the best, by many measures, are the two teams stepping onto the court at 8:00 p.m. MDT on Tuesday.

“We’ve got our hands full,” said Jazz coach Quin Snyder after the Clippers advanced past Dallas on Sunday. “That’s what you expect in the playoffs.”

If the Jazz can get by the Clippers, they’ll face the winner of the Suns and Nuggets, teams that finished third and sixth best Net Ratings, respectively. If they are still standing after facing consecutive top-six opponents, their most likely Finals foes would be the Bucks (4th), Sixers (5th) or Nets (7th). There’s nothing even remotely easy from this point forward.

That said, the Jazz are equipped to win. No other team is as dominant on both ends as the Jazz, who employ a prolific playoff scorer, the best defensive anchor on the planet, and several guys who are elite in their specific roles. If this playoff run ends with the Jazz holding a shiny basketball up in front of their fans, it should come as a shock to nobody.

If this playoff run ends with someone else hoisting that hunk of metal, that’s not exactly shocking either. When two great teams square off in a playoff series, that by definition means one great team has to go home. As an NBA community, we tend to react to those outcomes as though the team sent home has failed, and in some cases that’s more true than in others. Other times, it’s just the sad arithmetic that four losses at this time of year — even to a truly great opponent — mean your season is done.

Take the dynastic Spurs. From 1999 to 2014, five championship parades snaked their way through San Antonio streets. But there were also 11 seasons in that stretch where they didn’t win a title. In eight of those seasons, they lost to a team with a top-7 Net Rating, and in seven of them they lost to an eventual finalist or champion.

In other words, sometimes great teams fall to other great teams, and it doesn’t mean they’re compositionally flawed. Had the Spurs overreacted to any of those 11 non title seasons, there’s no telling whether they still keep the pieces in place that allowed them to hang five banners. Or if you don’t believe the Spurs, the same goes for the 1990s Jazz, who in the six years leading up to their two Finals appearances, lost four times to top-3 Net Rating teams and the other two years to the eventual champion Rockets. Then, of course, they finally clawed their way out of the West just to encounter a generational juggernaut.

The broader point here: as long as the Jazz look like they belong for the rest of their 2021 playoff run, they’re in good shape. Their two best players are locked in for the long term, and they have one of the league’s top coaches. If they get all the way to a ring ceremony this year, that would be amazing for a fan base that has never celebrated an NBA title. But as long as they look the part, this postseason could represent the opening of their title window, not a single, all-in shot.

Enjoy it. Expect big things. Have fun and root hard. Believe your team is good enough, because that’s what makes this experience special and because the Jazz have shown they are worthy of this moment.

So have the Clippers. So have the Nuggets and Suns. So have the East’s elite. One team is going to keep showing it right up until the moment when Adam Silver hands them some hardware.

Scouting the Clips

It’s hard to find stats to illustrate just how good the Clippers are at full strength because, frankly, that just hasn’t been their reality this season. As noted above, their biggest stars appeared in just 43 games together. But it goes beyond those two. Their preferred starting lineup — with Patrick Beverley, Serge Ibaka and Nic Batum joining the all-league talents — saw just 19 games of regular season action, and dominated to the tune of a +16.7 Net Rating and a 14-5 record.

That said, Beverley’s offensive struggles and Ibaka’s continued health woes have kept the Clippers improvising even into the postseason. Reggie Jackson has taken over as starting point guard, first with Ivica Zubac and Marcus Morris as the bigs. That combination saw just 20 games of collective regular season action (15-5, +18.8). As the series went on, they reinstated Batum to the starting lineup, making Morris a small-ball centers, a variation that played together just 10 times before the playoffs (4-6, +12.0).

In other words, the Clippers haven’t benefitted from a ton of continuity, but coach Ty Lue has several different options for assembling winning lineups.

“We’re well aware of how good they are and have tremendous respect for them,” Snyder said on Sunday.

“Certainly,” he added shortly afterward, “they know we are.”

Clippers on defense

The Jazz’s own talent and configurations will at least partially dictate what the Clippers can get away with. The Morris-at-center lineups helped LAC shift the Dallas series — they opened 0-2 and had to win consecutive elimination games to advance. But that worked because of the Mavs’ personnel choices. Dallas’ main response to the smallball attack in Game 7 was to play super big. But Morris was able to deal the plodding Boban Marjanovic, a player he held to 6-of-14 shooting in the series. Other times Morris would be left to guard Kristaps Porzingis, a configuration the Clips could live with because it gave them freedom to play aggressively and switch a bunch against pick and rolls involving Porzingis and Luka Doncic.

Rudy Gobert presents a different set of challenges than Marjanovic and Porzingis, and if the Jazz are going to punish the Clips for playing small, it’s going to have to involve some big stretches for the big fella. Morris succeeded against Boban largely by bodying him and making him shoot jump hooks, but if the Jazz ball handlers can get the ball to Gobert quickly on slips and high entry passes, Morris isn’t exactly someone who can break that up by living above the rim. (In non-center minutes, Morris spent most of his time guarding Maxi Kleber, whose spiritual equivalent in the Jazz’s offense is Bojan Bogdanovic. Expect to see that matchup throughout the series.)

Elsewhere, the Jazz have enough capable facilitators to make the Clippers’ many ball hawks do work. Reggie Jackson can’t spend significant portions hiding off ball like he did with Dallas’ Dorian Finney-Smith, especially when both of Utah’s All-Star facilitators are healthy. Even George spent a lot of time guarding DFS with varying levels of sincerity, although to his credit he did also shift over to Tim Hardaway Jr. more after THJ went into human torch mode early on. The closest thing the Jazz have to a DFS-level hiding spot is Royce O’Neale, but even he is a much more established shooting threat and a smarter ball mover than Finney-Smith. 

More to the point, when Utah is healthy, there are just always going to be 3-4 guys on the court who can create (for themselves and/or others) with the ball in their hands. They could involve Beverley more to deal with Utah’s many ball handlers, but he didn’t give them enough offensively in the Dallas series to justify big minutes. Rajon Rondo and Terance Mann will both have opportunities off the bench, but neither of them is considered a lockdown stopper.

Frankly, a lot of this may come down to Leonard having to guard the ball more. Lue dragged his feet in engaging Leonard as a primary option to slow Doncic in round one, conscious of the load the 2-time champion carries for them on offense as well. Against the Jazz, it’s just not clear where the Clippers can find Kawhi a matchup that doesn’t keep him actively involved on defense. The Jazz don’t necessarily want Kawhi’s 7-foot-3 wingspan draped around one of their guards either, but they want to keep him actively working at that end. 

One of Leonard/George will almost certainly start with O’Neale as a primary matchup, and a sneaky key to this series will be the degree to which O’Neale can make those guys guard by hitting shots and attacking selectively from the wing.

In whatever games Mike Conley Jr. misses — he’s been ruled out for Game 1 — this will look a little different. His absence will promote Joe Ingles into more of a ball handling role, and he will need to be much more aggressive than he was in round one. At the back of the rotation, Conley’s absence means we’ll see Miye Oni for a few minutes here or there to bridge rest times. Like O’Neale, Oni will have to make sure he’s ready to make the Clipper wings actually guard him, but in a playoff rotation he probably won’t see a ton of time.

Conley being out introduces more size into Utah’s rotations, but comes with an undeniable cost in terms of playmaking, especially if the Clippers employ aggressive schemes that demand instantaneous reads from Jazz ball handlers. It also makes the bench units more reliant on Clarkson to some degree, and that can either go really well for Utah… or really poorly.

Keys for the Jazz when they have the ball:

• Who’s guarding Mitchell and can the budding superstar maintain his torrid 2-season pace of 34 points per 36 playoff minutes going?
• Can Gobert punish small lineups by living at the rim?
• How many games does Conley play, and can the Jazz tap into aggressive Ingles and/or efficient Clarkson in whatever games he misses?

Clippers on offense

Similar issues exist for Utah at the other end. The Clippers are unique in the contender class in that they don’t have any one guy who’s going to go run 40-plus pick-and-rolls per game. George, Leonard and Jackson will all handle the ball a lot, but it will look and feel different from the guard-oriented pick-and-roll play that generates a lot of the top teams’ offense.

That unconventional-ness also means asking things of defenders that they aren’t used to doing quite to the same degree. Guys like Bogdanovic and Georges Niang don’t spend a ton of possessions as the primary defender of the ball handler in pick-and-roll. Gobert is going to be an off-ball helper more than in a typical evening the basketball. The guards may find themselves checking the screener as opposed to fighting their way over and around picks.

Leonard and George will screen for each other a lot, and they’ll involve Morris (a 47% 3-point shooter this season) in actions as well. This means Bogdanovic will play a more central role in pick-and-roll defense than he is used to. Frankly, even Mitchell is going to have to play a huge role on the defensive end. He’s shown himself capable of that for stretches throughout his career, but will he have the juice to use 30-40% of the Jazz’s possessions and also check someone like PG-13? And again, O’Neale will be hugely important. One would think he’ll spend most of him time on Kawhi, but all of the Clippers’ unique P&R combinations will result in O’Neale getting switched.

The Clippers mostly run pick-and-roll for their ball handlers; their roll men use very few of their possessions with a shot or turnover. They rely a bit more on post-ups in the regular season than the average team, but they haven’t had to resort to that in the playoffs much (just 3% of their possessions). We’ll see an iso scorer use something like 10% of their possessions.

Where they’re at their most dangerous, though, is running actions in the middle of the floor with the goal of setting the table for shooters. Nobody came even close to the 1.24 points they generated in the regular season on possessions used by a spot shoter. They scored 31.5 points per game on spot-up plays, and that’s up to 36.0 in the postseason — both league-leading marks. They are just crazy at creating and converting open shots.

In the regular season, 34.6% of their shots were threes with the nearest defender at least four feet away. So far in the playoffs — and granted, Dallas isn’t a great defensive outfit — that number has ballooned to 39.8%, roughly tied with Atlanta for the largest share of uncontested playoff threes, and a tiny bit better than Utah’s 38.9%. Four of the 12 players averaging more than six points per game on spot-up shots this postseason are employed by the Clippers.

They led the league in 3-point shooting for the year, including the highest percentage both from the corners and above the break.

The Jazz will hope to mitigate some of that by pushing guys into Gobert’s domain. Running shooters off the three point line and into pull-up territory is a huge part of Utah’s defensive identity, and became the central narrative in the two Jazz-Clippers games where the teams were mostly healthy. In the game Utah won, the Clips shot 11-for-36 (30.6%) on twos outside the restricted area. In the Cilpper win, they shot 19-for-38 (50%).

But since those matchups, the Clippers have gotten much more disciplined at passing out of those situations to an open shooter. So this series may not come down to simple midrange make-or-miss math, as much as the Jazz would prefer that. The Clippers have seven rotation regulars who finished the season above 40% from deep, and Leonard (39.8%) and Beverley (39.7%) were a rounding error away from making it nine. Keeping them in check from outside is without a doubt going to be Utah’s hardest — and most vital — task in this series.

Their size is another reason why there are bound to be some awkward defensive matchups for Utah. The Jazz nearly always have two of Conley, Mitchell and Jordan Clarkson on the floor together, but most of LAC’s lineups configurations have just one guy smaller than Kawhi’s 6-foot-7 frame. George, Morris and Batum are all 6-foot-8. So let’s say you have one of Utah’s smaller guards checking whichever of Jackson/Beverley is on the court — who is the other one guarding? (The answer here is surely someone like Batum who’s not going to just attack that mismatch 1-on-1. But at 6-foot-8, he can just as easily elevate over the closeout of a diminutive guard and still get a clean look.)

They just have weapons everywhere, not unlike the Jazz. Snyder knows this — “You can’t take everything away,” he said on Sunday — and his job is to give his team a game plan that minimizes the Clippers’ best looks.

Keys for the Jazz when LAC has the ball:

• Can Utah stop the ball without giving up a ton of open 3s?
• Who is Gobert guarding, and will he be able to sag just enough to impact the paint?
• Can guys like Bogdanovic and Mitchell be good enough defensively when they’re pulled into the P&R defense in ways they’re maybe not as used to?

Heavyweights

This should be great basketball. The Jazz are now 56-21 including the postseason, and the Clips showed over an over again in the Dallas series that they can access another gear behind their 2-time Finals MVP.

Both teams are deep, talented, multi-faceted, and play smartly at both ends of the court. They’re two of the best shooting teams. They’re two of the best defenses. They’re two of the best at just generally opposing their will on a basketball game.

Someone’s will is about to be imprinted on this series just the tiniest bit more strongly than the other.

The top eFG% defense (Utah) against the #2 eFG% offense (LAC). The second best halfcourt offense (LAC) going up against the league’s stingiest halfcourt D (Utah). The team that takes the most threes (Utah) against the team that converts the highest percentage (LAC). A team that relies on above-average midrange threats (LAC) against a team that aims to force teams into the midrange (Utah).

The first real test for the 2021 Jazz starts now. And it should be an absolutely fascinating 192 to 336 minutes of basketball.