Salt City Seven: How to Enjoy Following a Non-Competitive Team & More

Which of these Jazzmen are long-term pieces and which are passing through? It’s one of the most interesting questions in following a rebuilding squad. (Trent Nelson, The Salt Lake Tribune)

Every week during the regular season begins here at SCH with the Salt City Seven, a septet of recurring 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 look at the big, burning question of the moment in Jazzland

The Jazz were supposed to have a rough year last season, which prompted this writer to spend some time before the season started writing a couple of pieces about how to enjoy watching a team in a non-competitive season.

With the Jazz at 7-15 and another tough stretch coming, it’s probably worth revisiting. You can still have fun following a team that loses twice as often as it wins, but it requires treating the experience slightly differently. Instead of living and dying by outcomes, it can be more enjoyable to watch with a sort of intellectual curiosity. And for me, that curiosity tends to revolve around three big areas:

Ultimately, that’s the main question for a rebuilding team to answer. It will likely take a minute for the Jazz to be competitive again, which means that by then, some of the current guys will invariably either move on themselves, age out of the project timeline, or perhaps be used as pieces in a deal to hasten the return to relevance.

So who’s most likely to be around and making an impact on the next competitive team? I think it’s easiest to think about it in groupings.

• Non-rotation minimums. History shows these are the most transient pieces in a rebuild. Luka Samanic probably ranks as the least likely long-term piece here just because technically his contract is still just partially guaranteed. Kris Dunn has a full guarantee for the season and has basically been the 11th man. Omer Yurtseven straddles this group and the next, but we’ll slot him here for now since he’s back out of the rotation and he has a near-minimum contract that is fully non-guaranteed for next year.
• Vets on short deals. Kelly Olynyk and Talen Horton-Tucker are both among the top eight minute-getters so far. Utah could easily retain either or both, but until that happens, their long-term future seems murkier than just about anybody below. THT’s age makes him seem more likely to get a new deal, but on the other hand, Olynyk seems more woven into the fabric of what Utah does. So order those two however you want. Simone Fontecchio’s contract also expires next summer, but the Jazz at least have the potential to retain his matching rights. None of these guys will have great trade value on their own, but their expiring status makes them most likely to be part of conversations between now and the trade deadline.
• Vets on longer deals. Collin Sexton, Jordan Clarkson and John Collins are a huge part of Utah’s present (sixth, third and first in total minutes, respectively). All have three years of contract left (Collins has two + a very likely player option), which means only teams that really want them would be trade partners, as opposed to the three above who could be seen either as basketball targets or expiring filler.  All feel like non-core pieces as of today, which means the likelihood of them being included in some deal along the way is non-trivial. Assuming they stick around through their current contracts, Clarkson will be a free agent at 34, which seems to make him least likely to get another deal. But Utah loves him and he loves Utah, so who knows. Sexton and Collins are both interesting (if flawed) players who will still be in their 20s as 2026 free agents.
• Rookie contract guys. By definition these guys are among the most likely to be around, just because teams have the option to control the first 6-8 years of a player’s career after selecting him in the first round. Brice Sensabaugh probably needs to play more than two NBA minutes before we call him a future piece, but the other four have all shown signs. Taylor Hendricks is finally getting NBA run, and you can see bits of the defense and shooting that made him tantalizing. Ochai Agbaji is already good enough as a perimeter defender to be entrusted with the toughest assignments, and has had opportunities (mostly last season) to show off some offensive tools, too. Walker Kessler’s sophomore struggles have been exaggerated: his hands and footwork have not been quite as good on offense, but he’s still really impactful as a paint protector. And Keyonte George is already being asked to more or less run an NBA offense.
• Burgeoning stars. This category is exactly one guy big at the moment, and it’s why I think the “execs are wondering about Lauri Markkanen’s availability” chatter is likely to go nowhere. The whole point of this phase of a rebuild is to identify the next grouping of stars that can lead your team. Everything I hear still points to the Jazz wanting Markkanen to be here for a long, long time.

The list is fluid. As contracts, roles and outputs change, so does the calculus on who is most likely to call Utah home for a while. To me, that’s the most interesting thing to monitor in a season like this one.

2. Watching players develop

Perhaps the most rewarding part of following a rebuilding outfit is watching those guys add to their games. It was fun watching Agbaji incrementally expand his comfort zone last season, or seeing Kessler figure out how to impact opposing offenses. It was even more thrilling to watching a career 15-ppg scorer suddenly morph into early-career Dirk with an added dose of Shawn Kemp’s disdain for the rim.

It’s fun to guess what’s next, too. Will Markkanen continue that trajectory, or level off as a really elite dependent scorer? Will Sexton remain a pace-changing sparkplug in specific situations or earn the trust to do more? Will THT maintain enough efficiency to earn himself an extended look, or ultimately be a footnote to the larger rebuild?

Development isn’t linear, either. So when players stagnate or surge, stall or soar, part of living through this stage of a rebuild is getting to have opinions and theories about what’s real and what’s a mirage.

3. Seeing a basketball identity form

This takes the longest to really figure out what the Jazz are going to be from an identity standpoint when they’re great again. But with their lead strategist being just 104 games into his head coaching career, there’s still a lot of interesting stuff to suss out relative to his philosophies and how they’ll shape the next era. For example, we already can tell where Will Hardy stands on the debate of offensive rebounding vs. sending everybody back on defense. People who pay attention even during this competitive lull are going to get a lot of little hints that matter in regards to basketball ideologies that will matter when the Jazz eventually begin their ascent.

So yeah, this part of the project is its own kind of fun. It requires caring much less about the result on any given night, but honestly, the stuff you get out of the season by zooming out is probably more interesting anyway than whether the 2023-24 Jazz will win 35 games or 27 or 40. My advice: be curious, watch with broad questions in mind, and don’t let the scoreboard decide how much you were entertained by four quarters of basketball.

Telling or interesting words from Jazz people

“That was a masterpiece — of dogshit.”

–Hardy, after a 50-point loss to Dallas

No six words from the past week were as noteworthy or entertaining as those ones.

What’s funniest about this quote is that Hardy employed that metaphor and then went on to say that he didn’t feel a need to yell and scream at the players. They’re grown-ups, he explained, and they feel just as upset about the poor showing as he did. And yet… he led off his postgame remarks with masterpiece of canine excrement.

The element of that game that most qualified for that colorful descriptor was the halfcourt defense. After an incredibly rough start there, the Jazz had held five straight opponents to 100 or below in halfcourt efficiency, something they had achieved just five times in their first 15 games. But then they went to Dallas and… holy smokes. The Mavs scored 136.1 points per play in the halfcourt, per Cleaning the Glass. It was Utah’s worst performance in that department by 13 full points, and only the Pelicans (@ LAL in the IST semifinal) and Washington (@ Philly) have had worse games this NBA season.

Stats that tell the story of the week

-6.7

The Jazz have been outscored by their opponents in points off of turnovers in 16 of their 22 games. The league-worst 20.6 points per game they gift their opponents through turnovers is on average 6.7 more than their own turnover points, also the worst figure in the association. 

46.7%

I alluded to it above, but Kessler’s struggles have probably been overstated, at least on defense. Opponents are shooting 46.7% at the rim when Kessler is nearby. That’s the lowest figure of the 64 players who have contested at least 70 rim attempts.  

.736

Olynyk probably deserves more flowers than he’s getting for holding things together. He has a team-best .736 true shooting figure, and the best net rating of all the rotation regulars. He trails only Markkanen in a bunch of advanced stats, like BPM, WS/48 and VORP.

1-15

The Jazz are now 1-15 when entering the fourth quarter, better than only 0-15 Washington and 0-16 Detroit. The positive aspect of that stat, I suppose, is that in the rare instances where the Jazz lead or are tied after 36 minutes, they’re 6-0.

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

Sadly, no game balls to give out this week. But we will recognize the top performers from Utah’s two losses.

Strong in defeat:

• Jazz 97, Mavs 147: Ochai Agbaji. In a game with few actual bright spots, there’s no reason to overcomplicate by doing anything other than rewarding the top scorer and the only person (other than Hendricks) to score with any kind of efficiency. It was Agbaji’s first 20-plus game of the season. I’d feel better about this choice if he had any rebounds, assists or blocks (he did have two steals), but this is sort of the default choice on the night of another team-wide clunker.
• Jazz 103, Clippers 117: John Collins. Sexton helped make things interesting with an energetic few minutes in the fourth, and would probably be the “narrative” choice for that reason alone. But his earlier minutes were pretty rough on Utah’s win probability, so this is another one where it’s probably safer to keep it simple. It was probably Collins’ best all-around statline: 20 points, 13 boards, 4 blocks, 2 assists and 2 steals. His defense was problematic, and a huge reason Kawhi Leonard went off, but that’s not exactly a great matchup for him. The other option here was Olynyk (13 points on 5 shots, +6 for the game), but given that Collins played nearly twice the minutes, it should probaby be him. 

Breaking down the Xs and Os behind a Jazz score.

When you play with a non-shooting big, you have to prepared for what happens when the defender assigned to him just has no interest in following him to the perimeter. The Clippers’ Ivica Zubac spends a lot of time in “drop” coverage anyway, and when he was matched up with Kessler on Friday, he mostly wanted to hang way back. So Utah employed a simple counter:

There are two things to highlight here. First is the little 3-man action on the left side that the Jazz use to get their preferred defender switched onto George. Clarkson screens for Fontecchio off ball, and the latter immediately screens for George as he pitches the ball right back to him. This results in George having a defender on him who’s, umm, not the best at screen navigation in space.

Once Fontecchio runs through, Kessler is standing all alone. The Jazz turn Kessler’s lack of gravity into a spacing advantage by having George sprint right into a ball screen with the unguarded Kessler. Now there’s nobody to help on the ball screen, and George — a 41% pull-up 3-shooter over the last 10 games — can step right into an uncontested triple.

The same concept is at play here, except that instead of giving Sexton (who’s being checked here by a much better defender) space to pull up, the Jazz guard instead attacks the empty space created by Zubac not coming out to show on the screen.

Zubac tries to split the difference between the driving Sexton and a wide roll by Kessler. But when Sexton veers right as though he’s going to simply drive across the paint, Zubac fully commits to Kessler. That’s when Sexton jumps left to take a short floater.

Smart teams do this a lot with unguarded bigs, quickly turning them into a screener to punish the defensive float guy. When that dude isn’t in position to help, the team can’t guard the P&R according to their scheme du jour.

Looking ahead to the next seven nights of action

After an usually light week last week, the Jazz have four games in the next six nights. Here are a couple of sentences about each:

• Monday, 12/11: Jazz @ Thunder. Not that long ago, the Jazz and Thunder were considered to be in similar places on the rebuild path, but then the Jazz lost some of their more gluey parts and OKC integrated a redshirted #2 overall pick back into their program. The result is that they’ve shot to second in the West, and they’re 9-3 in their last 12 behind another All-NBA campaign from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (31-6-6-3-1).
• Wednesday, 12/13: Jazz vs. Knicks. The Jazz are no longer the best offensive rebounding team in the league (by OReb%), and the team who took their spot is coming to town on Wednesday (albeit without their best offensive rebounder). Jalen Brunson is looking like a very legit lead guard, and the Knicks were on a 10-3 tear before a road trip took them through Milwaukee and Boston for double-digit losses.
• Thursday, 12/14: Jazz @ Blazers. Somehow, this will be the last meeting of the year between these division rivals, with the home team winning each time so far. Jerami Grant, DeAndre Ayton and Malcolm Brogdon have all been day-to-day for Portland, although Anfernee Simons is back and has averaged 29.0 points and 6.0 assists over two games.
• Saturday, 12/16: Jazz @ Kings. This is also the fourth in sixth nights for Sacramento, who defeated the Jazz easily in the season opener for both teams. The Kings are 10-4 since November 8, and their starting give is one of the NBA’s top 5-man units at +13.5, thanks to the brilliance of De’Aaron Fox (31-5-7) and Domantas Sabonis (19-12-7). 

Random stuff from the Jazz community

Clippers beat writer Justin Russo shared a wild fact in the interview room before Clips-Jazz on Friday: apparently at that point Ty Lue, with 467 regular season games on his résumé as the head coach in Cleveland and then L.A., had never beaten the Jazz in Utah in nine regular tries. He of course has playoff wins in Utah under his belt, and now he’s 1-9 after Friday’s win.

It made me wonder what other current NBA head coaches have never tasted victory in Salt Lake City.

• First year head coaches Darko Rajakovic (Tor) and Adrian Griffin (Mil) have yet to coach against the Jazz in Utah. Same goes for Quin Snyder (Atl) who of course coached the Jazz for eight seasons, but took over in Atlanta last season after the Hawks had already made their trip to the Wasatch Front.
• Ime Udoka (Hou) and Joe Mazzulla (Bos) are both 0-1 against the Jazz as head coaches.
• But the big winner (?) is Steve Clifford (Cha), who has come up empty on nine trips to Utah as the head coach of the Bobcats/Hornets and the Magic.

Only three current coaches have winning records as visitors in Utah. Tom Thibodeau is 6-5 and Chris Finch is 3-2, but the coach with the best record against the Jazz in Utah (at 8-5) is actually somewhat surprising. Tweet at me with your guess and the first person to guess the correct guy will get a RT and my undying respect.

That’s a wrap on another week!