Salt City Seven: Stars Being Stars, Small-Ball, Spida’s Passing & More

Gobert and his fellow All-Stars have been superb for the Jazz lately (Rick Egan via sltrib.com)

Every Monday during the regular season, the 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.

A quick dissection of a big-picture topic or burning question relevant to the week in Jazzland.

The big picture is suddenly much rosier in Salt Lake City and around the global community of Jazz fans. Not that long ago, alarm bells sounded after some lackluster efforts, last-second gut punches and close calls against unspectacular teams. Now, the fragile emotional state of Jazz Nation’s yesterweek seems a distant memory.

Utah has gotten things back on track with four straight wins, and an 8-2 record over their last 10. The ball movement and blistering 3-point shooting that has defined the club dating back to last season has returned: 26 assists per game and 45% 3-point shooting during this win streak.

But the biggest development propelling Utah back to its rightful place as essentially co-favorites¹ to come out of the West: their stars are playing like stars.

Rudy Gobert has been simply phenomenal of late. Even most Jazz fans still don’t fully grasp just how special a season he’s having as a paint denier. He’s challenging 7.0 rim attempts per game and allowing opponents to shoot just 43.8% when he’s defending. Nobody else who guards even six or more nightly rim attempts is below 51.6% allowed². That means he’s almost eight full percentage points better than the next best volume rim defender. That’s wild.

If that 43.8% figure held, it would be the best year of his career in that department by nearly four percentage points.

But he hasn’t just been superb at the rim. Gobert is on pace to defend the most shots overall in the NBA for the fourth consecutive season: 427 so far, or 46 more than second-place Anthony Davis. On all shots combined, shooters have converted at 8.2% lower than their expected field goal clip with Gobert contesting. To find someone with a more gaping difference, you have to go all the way down to Derrick Rose, who has defended a little over a third the number of shots (162) and has held players 10.4% below the expected outcome.

Ah, but versatility, right? Casuals and pundits alike will point to the fact that in a league obsessed with threes, Gobert’s impact is limited to the painted area and therefore not as meaningful. Except… that’s not true. Gobert defends 4.1 threes per game and holds opponents to 29.2% shooting as the nearest defender. For reference, that’s practically the same number of threes that Vegas’ current DPOY frontrunner Draymond Green contests per game (4.4) and his opponents make 36.5% of them. (That’s not a shot at Green; he’s been superb defensively as well. It’s just a reference point to understanding how special a year Gobert is having all over the court.)

We’ve already used this website to make the point that the Jazz are deploying Gobert beyond the defensive paint more than ever before, so we won’t belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that he’s been his usual dominant self in the paint while also attaining the level of an absolute stopper out in space. His isolation defense — .67 points per possession that an iso scorer uses against Gobert — is almost literally twice as good Green’s 1.19³. Again, Green is brilliant and versatile and impactful. By a lot of measures, Gobert is simply just as impactful, even away from the key.

He also remains an offensive difference-maker in ways that are easy to ignore but impossible to overstate. He has a unique brand of inside-out gravitational pull that enables Utah to be as prolific as they are from the outside. Watch how he celebrates after this play that seemingly doesn’t involve him; he knows that the terror he instills as a roll threat was crucial in this play design even though he never touched the ball.  

Liked this set play from last night. Good counter to switching. Since they know the switch is coming, Rudy can go early on the roll and keep the defender on his shoulder. Gay’s flash cut from the weakside is timed perfectly so he has Gobert rolling w/ nobody in front of him. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/hZEpONSh61

— dan c. (@danclayt0n) December 4, 2021

Meanwhile, Donovan Mitchell has been so stellar of late that he just pulled in his third career Player of the Week honors. A tidy 33-4-6 week on 71% true shooting and with a double-digit Net Rating made this one of the best week’s of Mitchell’s career — all while facing three likely playoff teams.

His outside shooting has come and gone, so Mitchell has responded by focusing on his dazzling array of moves inside the arc. Only 18 NBA players log more drives per game than Mitchell’s 14.5 nightly forays, and of those 18, only Luka Doncic and Malcolm Brogdon have a higher field goal percentage on shots taken while driving. The Jazz guard is having his best season ever at the rim (64%) and in floater range (48%), which comprise almost half of his shots.

Because of how solid he has been, the lineups featuring him as the lone Jazz All-Star are outscoring teams by 7.4 points per 100 possessions. Last season, the same lineups were +0.9. (Our Ken Clayton took a longer look at lineup configurations last week as part of our collaboration with the Salt Lake Tribune.)

Both Gobert and Mitchell rank in the top 10 for Dunksandthrees.com’s Estimated Plus-Minus metric. Mike Conley ranks 13th, the product of his lights-out shooting, disciplined facilitation, and overall veteran savvy. It’s a huge luxury to have a player of Conley’s caliber as their third best player.

Stars are doing star things, and that’s why things suddenly feel hopeful again up and down the Wasatch Front. 

In their own words

“(Playing small) something that we’ve anticipated throughout the season and something we’ve wanted to do as well… It’s ironic that this is the game where it happens, we’re playing against three 7-footers.”

-Jazz coach Quin Snyder on smallball lineups he was forced to use on Sunday in Cleveland

When the Jazz signed Rudy Gay last summer, one of the purported benefits was the option of using the 6-foot-8 veteran as a smallball center in 5-out lineups. But with Gobert dominating and Hassan Whiteside (mostly) looking solid in a backup role, the need hadn’t arisen… until Sunday.

Whiteside’s sore behind meant that Utah went into their matinee against the Cavs with only one traditional center.

The Jazz did OK in their first real smallball minutes of the season, holding their own to the tune of 22-24 in just under 10 minutes. But more important than the outcomes, it was the crew’s first chance to start to figure out how everybody’s job changes when there’s not a 7-footer diving to the rim on offense or erasing their mistakes on the other end. (The Jazz have also played seven total minutes with Eric Paschall as the nominal center, and had a similar output in those minutes, losing narrowly by a combined score of 12-13.)

If the non-centers on the roster can use these opportunities to master how to defend differently with no safety net behind them, it could pay real dividends now and in the postseason. So let’s keep an eye on that differential.

Stats that tell the story of the Jazz’s week.

5.3%

Utah’s turnover percentage against Portland on Monday was the lowest figure in any NBA game this season. 

19

Last Monday, Gobert blocked Damian Lillard for the 19th time in their 29 career head-to-head games. That makes Dame the player Gobert has swatted the most — tied with Minnesota’s Karl-Anthony Towns, whom Gobert will see this week.

7,000

Mitchell became the 12th fastest player in the 3-point era to reach 7,000 career points when he hit the milestone on Sunday, his 300th career game..

27

The Jazz-Celtics game on Friday was just the 7th time in NBA history (& first this season) that a team hit at least 27 threes in a regular season game. All seven of those games have happened since April 2019, and the Jazz and Rockets have each had two of them.

Keeping track of the Jazz’s place in the wild, wild West.

Now that all 30 teams are past the 20-game mark, we should start seeing more predictive systems and macro stats come online for the season soon.

So to kill some time while we wait, let’s spend this week looking at the Jazz’s performance against elite teams.

One way to gauge teams’ ability to content for a title is to see how they fare against other elite teams. The Jazz are 5-3 against teams with a top-10 efficiency differential, per Cleaning the Glass, but their offense in those games REALLY holds up: they score 119.6 per 100 non-garbage time possessions, even against the league’s elite. The next best team at executing their stuff against top teams is almost three full points behind that mark (Portland’s 116.7).

Not surprisingly, it’s Utah’s defense that hasn’t translated quite as well against top-10 differential teams. They’re 12th in defense against those 10 squads.

The Jazz are also the best offense when facing the best defenses: 3-1 with a 116.5 offense in games against teams with a top-10 defense. Against top-10 offenses, their defense actually tightens up to 9th, but they’re 4-3 in those games (the losses coming to Chicago, Miami and Miami). 

Recognizing the best (or most memorable) performances from each Jazz win.

We like keeping the Game Ball department busy. Here are three imaginary Wilsons to mark Utah’s 3-0 week.

Jazz 129, Blazers 107: Donovan Mitchell. This was a brutally tough call between Gobert and Mitchell. Gobert dominated early and had an unreal impact on the scoreboard (+46.0 per 100 possessions). Since the start of last season, players have gone for 21 and 16 on 80% from the field or better just 13 times — three of them were Gobert games. Gobert being asked to guard a little differently was also a huge part of holding Damian Lillard to 11 points on 12 shots. But I went with Mitchell for two main reasons. First: he took control in a 14-point third, just as the Jazz were pulling away for good. Second: I just can’t bring myself to shut him out in a week he averaged 33.0 points. Also, his own line (30-5-4) was something players have only done 31 times since the start of last season, plus he was efficient (1.5 points per shot) and took care of the ball (5:1 Ast/TO ratio). Ingles also had an 11-point third quarter, Clarkson rode a hot fourth to a 22-6-3 line, and Conley was superb defensively as the primary guy on Lillard.

Jazz 137, Celtics 130: Mike Conley. Mike was the near unanimous pick in our Twitter vote, but this was a lot closer for me. Both he and Mitchell were phenomenal from the jump (9 and 11 first-quarter points, respectively) and phenomenal down the stretch, as evidenced by their combined 24 points in the fourth, on 78% shooting. They had similar defensive nights when guys they were marking used the possession, and both guys were great with the ball. When it’s this close, I think it’s OK to let narrative points break the tie, and you all basically told me in the Twitter vote that you’ll remember this game as the game Conley couldn’t miss: 7-for-7 from three, 29-4-7 on just 13 shots. That’s not really that much better than Mitchell’s 34-1-6 on 22 shots, but Conley gets this one. Gobert was once again excellent, too.

Jazz 109, Cavs 108: Rudy Gobert. Once again, I’ll abide by the Twitter vote that almost unanimously gave it to the big fella, but Mitchell absolutely carried the Jazz for stretches on a stellar 35-3-7 night. But sure, after the Celtics tied the game at 97-all, Mitchell closed 2-for-5 with 2 TOs for seven total points on seven used possessions, and the Jazz were able to survive precisely because Gobert made one eye-popping defensive play after another. As several people put it on the socials, it’s not often you see someone dominate as much in a 6-point performance, but the 20 rebounds, five blocks and three assists help, as did the fact that Cleveland’s guys shot under 42% from the field while guarded by Gobert, Mitchell was great, and Rudy Gay had a really nice impact in his first extended run as a small-ball five (15 points and eight rebounds overall).

Looking ahead to the next seven nights of Jazz action.

Utah’s 4-game-in-7-night road trip continues after the win in Cleveland, with a midweek back-to-back and a Saturday evening game against a surprising team.

Wednesday 12/8, Jazz @ Wolves: The Wolves are 8-5 since a 3-7 start, but the larger picture shows that they’ve been better than most people realize when they’ve had their main three guys. Since the start of last season, they are 24-20 with all of Karl-Anthony Towns, D’Angelo Russell and Anthony Edwards active. The Jazz are acutely aware of how competent the Wolves are at their best; Utah lost all three matchups last year with that trio of Minnesota stars healthy. At the moment, KAT is dealing with a sore tailbone and missed Friday’s game, so keep an eye on his status. Second-year wing Jaden McDaniels is also listed as day-to-day, while veteran pest Patrick Beverley is out for at least another week or so.

Thursday 12/9, Jazz @ Sixers: The Sixers have fielded 13 different starting lineups as they deal with a bevy of health issues. They started 8-2 even as the Ben Simmons saga dragged on, but then a variety of injuries and illnesses derailed them and they’ve lost nine of 13. Every starter other than Tyrese Maxey — who has been a revelation this year — has missed significant time. Joel Embiid contracted COVID-19 and missed three weeks (the Sixers went 2-7), and he’s been up and down since then as he continues to look winded and tired at times. He’s still averaging almost 25 per game since returning, but on 49% true shooting. Matysse Thybulle also missed time due to COVID protocols, Danny Green missed seven games with hamstring issues, Shake Milton has had ankle and groin problems, and Tobias Harris had the flu. This is also a tough back-to-back for Utah: a 2.5-hour flight and losing an hour along the way. The Jazz probably won’t get to their hotel rooms until 3 or 4 a.m. after flying a literal thousand miles.

Saturday 12/11, Jazz @ Wizards: Before the season, Vegas set the Wizards’ over/under at 33.5 wins and gave them the fourth lowest title odds in the Eastern Conference. Now, they’re 14-10 and tied for 4th in the East, despite All-Star Bradley Beal opening the season at 26% from three and starters Rui Hachimura and Thomas Bryant yet to play. So what’s the secret? It might actually be a tremendous amount of good luck. Their offense and defense are both in the bottom third of the league, and their point differential is negative. But they’ve done remarkably well in close games: they’re 11-1 in games that are inside a 5-point margin at any point in the last five minutes.

Random stuff from the Jazz community.

Mitchell has now had eight straight games of five assists or more, the longest such streak of his career. Since Deron Williams left the Jazz in 2011, only three Jazz players have had longer 5+ assist streaks: Conley had nine straight last January, Ingles had 11 straight back in 2019, and Ricky Rubio had three separate streaks of 11, 11 and 10 when he played for Utah.

The 25-year-old guard is having his best season ever for assists as a ratio of possessions used, and his dimes have already accounted for 282 of the Jazz’s points. Add that together with the 533 he has scored — you might have heard, but he’s pretty good at that, too — and that means he has had a hand in more than 31% of the club’s points this season. (That doesn’t even count free throw setups or and-1s.)

So who have been the biggest benefactors of all this generosity with the rock? Glad you asked.

Mitchell has been in a giving mood of late.

That’s four straight and eight of 10 for the Jazz. picking up steam now…