Salt City Seven: 3 Graphs to Grasp the Season, Noteworthy Stats, Draft Gems

April 16th, 2024 | by Dan Clayton

Will Hardy and his team just concluded the season at 31-51. (Rick Egan, 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

There it is: a 31-51 season, fully in the books.

The Utah Jazz’s season is over after a 5-25 close. Only in the franchise’s inaugural season (1974-75) did any Jazz team complete any 30-game span with a worse record. There’s obviously a ton of context to explain that, but it was fairly rough at times. Sixteen of those losses were by double digits.

Lauri Markkanen played just four of the team’s final 21 games due to quad and shoulder injuries. Jordan Clarkson missed 15 of the final 16. John Collins, Collin Sexton, Walker Kessler and Kris Dunn were shut down later. This was after Utah traded three rotation players in February. That meant that by the season’s close, the only rotation regular who was still getting minutes was rookie Keyonte George. Only at this point, the rookie guard was surrounded by other youngsters, two-way players, late-season pickups and guys promoted up from the deep bench.

And here’s the thing: it was the right move.

The wide gap between 10th place Golden State and the Jazz means Utah could have won FOURTEEN MORE GAMES(!) and still not made the play-in. Even if somehow they could have found a way to close 19-11, that record would have given them just enough wins to miss out on a first-round pick and still watch the play-in from home. What exactly would that have changed? The crackpipe of wins would have felt good on fourteen more nights, but that’s about it. Parts of Utah’s 5-25 close were rough on the eyes, but what they wound up with was objectively better than 14 more wins for the same postseason fate. And that’s if 19-11 was even remotely possible, which tons of advanced metrics would suggest is not the case.

In fact, here are three graphs that I think are important for all of us processing Utah’s 31-51 season.

1. Cumulative net rating

Source: NBA.com

Outside of the small sample size theater of the first few games, Utah’s net rating rank never climbed higher than 21st. Their cumulative net rating never once reached positive.

The spike in the red line made everybody feel great, but the Jazz at that point were still a negative net-rating outfit and a long shot to make the playoffs. What’s remarkable about the blue portion of this graph is that Utah was essentially the same team on a relative basis throughout the season: between 21st and 25th in net rating rank practically the whole season.

In short, the January surge felt fun, but the Jazz were never a super serious threat to do anything other than maybe make a play-in game. Maybe if a buyer trade had presented itself they could have gotten to the top half of the play-in, but it would have taken a 24-6 close to move past 7th place New Orleans. Nobody who was available was transforming the 23rd ranked net rating team into a 24-6 juggernaut, especially given their tough closing schedule.

As of the trade deadline, they were 13-23 against teams who finished .500 or better — not exactly a stat that screams “burgeoning playoff noise-maker.” Mostly they scored wins against the dregs (13-4 at the deadline vs. eventual sub-.500 teams), or against good teams with asterisks.

(LAC was pre-Harden; NOP was without Zion in one, without CJ and Trey Murphy in both; NYK was before the OG trade that transformed them into a contender; Philly had no Embiid; Milwaukee had no Dame the first time, no Khris/Brook the second; LAL lacked LeBron; and Indy didn’t have Haliburton. The Jazz properly stunned mostly-healthy Miami, Dallas, Denver and OKC.)

This is a long way of saying the Jazz’s struggles early and late are no less real than that fun middle stretch, and that on the aggregate they were never as good as it might have felt they were during that 19-10 run.

Another way of visualizing that:

2. Expected vs. actual win %

Source: NBA.com

The blue line here follows the exact trajectory of the net rating line above, as expected win percentage (at least the version we’re using here) is tied to net rating.

You’ll notice that starting right around game 16 (the first of back-to-back wins against the Pelicans), the Jazz’s actual win percentage starts to separate itself from the other line, and it doesn’t start narrowing again until after the Jazz’s 22-20 peak.

Essentially what this graph shows is that Utah was playing with house money for a while. Which is always fun, but the house generally does OK in the long run in most cases.

3. Minutes-weighted age

Source: nbaage.com

The proportion of Utah’s minutes being allocated to young players also had a pretty interesting correlation to the net rating trends. They were small-sample semi-good early on while playing mostly veterans, then saw net rating dip precisely when injuries forced them to involve more youth in the rotation. Markkanen got healthy and veteran Dunn got promoted right as the ascent started, after which the Jazz’s macro quality (and minutes-weighted age) plateaued for a while. Then trades and injuries caused a steep drop in rotation age right as the net rating was declining again.

Probably not a coincidence. Even good youngsters often struggle to play winning basketball early on, and by those final 20 games, the Jazz were relying almost exclusively on guys with fewer than 2,000 minutes of NBA run.

Which is OK! Really, the combined message of these graphs is that if the Jazz were not actually on pace to play super relevant basketball anyway, there’s nothing wrong with shifting the focus to information gathering on young players. The theory is that the Jazz could get more in the long run from giving these opportunities to George, Taylor Hendricks, Brice Sensabaugh and the link than they would from squeezing a 10-12 more wins out of a more veteran-heavy rotation just to finish 11th or 12th anyway, and miss out on a pick in the process.

Was it painful at times? Sure. Would we all have gone to bed happier a few more times if Utah didn’t trade or shut down most of its vets? Probably. But how you think about the Jazz’s mid-season pivot probably comes down to whether or not you have fully processed what these graphs say about the squad’s macro quality throughout the season.

 

Projecting the Jazz’s place in the broader picture

The pick-watching is basically done… at least, that is, until a coin flip that will come after the play-in tournament and then the May 12 lottery where Utah’s draft position will be solidified.

 

Telling or interesting words from Jazz people

“The first thing we all need to do is step away for a few days. Let everything settle, let the emotion wear off, get some rest, spend time with loved ones. And then come back to the table a little bit clearer mentally, a little bit fresher from an energy standpoint before we start to dig in on kinda what’s next for our team.”

-Will Hardy after the Jazz completed the season 31-51 

By the time you read this, several Jazz players and staffers might be on a beach somewhere. That’s by design, the head coach says.

“We’ve got some good young players on this roster. But they and we all have a lot of work to do to get where we want to go,” Hardy added. “That’s what’s on my mind. Let’s get back to Utah, everybody breathe for a minute, and then back to work.”

 

Stats that tell the story of the week

23rd

As spelled out above, that was Utah’s net rating rank to close the season, and in fact is right where they sat for most of the season on a cumulative basis. They finished the year 18th on offense, 30th on defense. Fueling those defensive woes was their league-worst mark in opponent 3-point percentage.

+11.0

For the season, the team was 11.0 points better in net efficiency when Markkanen played, per Cleaning the Glass. That’s a great sign that Utah’s best player is still a pretty damn good foundational piece.

28, 43

Markkanen and Sexton both finished the year in the top 50 of Andy Bailey’s Huge Nerd Index, a composite of several catch-all stats. Missed games likely hurt Markkanen in the composite versions which make up half the ranking, but Sexton emerging as a top-50 player is probably an undertold story about this season. The problem here is that you have to go clear down to 133 to find the next Jazz player (John Collins), and everybody else that finished the season with Utah was in the bottom half of the players meeting the minimum threshold of 500 minutes. 

50.9%

Aside from Markkanen and Sexton, the other Jazzman to finish with a positive Box Plus-Minus (with more than 7 games played) was Kessler. The second-year big still ranks first among the league’s most frequent rim challengers for defensive field goal percentage at the hoop, with 50.9%.

.521

It was an odd year for Clarkson, whose true shooting percentage (.521) was the lowest since his second pro season. He was hardly alone, though: he, Dunn, George, Sensabaugh, Talen Horton-Tucker and Luka Samanic had sub-.550 true shooting marks with at least 30 games played. Utah shot the third worst percentage on non-corner threes this season: 34.3%.

31

In all, Utah used 31 different starting lineups this season, including 17 groups that only saw a single game of action as the opening five.

 

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

The Jazz finally halted a 13-game losing streak, which means we were able to re-open the Game Ball department and hand out some leather orbs.

Jazz 124, Rockets 121: Kenneth Lofton Jr. In the moment, Lofton was the runaway choice. With the hindsight of knowing he was the clear choice for Friday’s Game Ball, I thought long and hard about spreading the love to Samanic (22-6-2, team-best +7) or Darius Bazley, who was everywhere during the stretch when Utah turned the game in their favor. But that felt a little like cheating, since Lofton was clearly the bigger story in this game, and his 14-9-5 and just general activity level were hugely important. In addition to the two runners-up already named, George had 20 and Sensabaugh added 17-6-3.

Jazz 110, Clippers 109: Kenneth Lofton Jr. If fans were heartened by Lofton’s hustle and energy on Thursday, they were positively giddy by the end of Friday’s game, in which Lofton looked virtually unstoppable at time. Sure, the Clips pulled their stars when their seeding situation looked settled just a few minutes into the game, but still: 27, 9 and 8 will get you the game ball more often than not. The Jazz offense was largely running through him as he showed off his vision from the middle of the court and also distributed on the break. Bazley might have been my second choice here (12 and 5), although the Jazz were +10 in Johnny Juzang’s minutes. 

Strong in defeat:

  • Jazz 95, Nuggets 111: Omer Yurtseven. We probably should go Horton-Tucker here on the merits of his 24-point night. But between the fact that he had more turnovers than assists (4 to 2) and the fact that he needed 23 shots to get his 24, that opened the door for a slightly more creative answer. The Turkish center had 20 points, 11 boards, and had to wrestle with a 2-time MVP. So we’ll give Omer his flowers. Samanic (15 and 10) was the second runner-up. 
  • Jazz 116, Warriors 123: Keyonte George. The rookie guard had his best game in a while, especially during a third-quarter flurry that put the Jazz back in front after trailing by double digits. He had a team-high 21, on 8/11 shooting with five threes. He was also +13 in a game the Jazz lost by 7. Had the Jazz been more motivated, he would have closed the game and the stretch run might have felt different. Yurtseven was also a complete monster with 11 and 18, and Hendricks also had his best game in a couple of weeks (16 points).

 

Looking ahead to the next seven nights of action

Nothing of note will happen to the Utah Jazz in the next 168 hours, but here are some key dates to watch out for this offseason:

  • April 22?: Draft ties broken. This is partially a guess; last season, the draft tiebreak process took place in the league’s Secaucus office on the Monday after the playoffs began, which makes sense since the play-in has to be complete before they know which teams are and aren’t in the lottery. Assuming they follow that pattern again, we’ll get word sometime in the afternoon on 4/22.
  • May 12: Draft lottery. This will be a big one for the Utah Jazz.
  • June 26-27: NBA Draft. The draft being split over two days could artificially juice the trade value of Utah’s #32 pick from Washington (that they got from Detroit).
  • June 28: Markkanen’s salary becomes fully guaranteed. The easiest decision the Jazz will make all summer.
  • June 29: Deadline to submit qualifying offers to potential restricted free agents. Kira Lewis Jr. and the three two-way players are eligible for qualifying offers.
  • June 30: Free agency begins. Teams can strike deals as early as 6pm EDT.
  • July 8-10: Salt Lake City Summer League. The Grizzlies, Thunder, Sixers and Jazz will have entrants.
  • July 25: Guarantee trigger dates. Lofton and Bazley get $400K of their salaries guaranteed if not waived.
  • August 6: Markkanen available for renegotiation. He’s already eligible for an extension, but the Jazz can’t add to his salary to accommodate a larger extension until this day. (Collins and Sexton also become extension eligble this summer, but there’s probably not a ton of urgency in either case since both have two years left.)
  • October 31: Team option deadlines for rookie scale contracts. Hendricks, George, Kessler and Sensabaugh will likely all have their options exercised.

Random stuff from the Jazz community

Let’s end here…

Since the coming weeks are sure to include a whole lot of discussion about the quality of the 2024 draft, it feels like a good time to remind ourselves that even the “bad” drafts have yielded multiple star players.

Every modern draft has produced at least three star players.

Every draft since 1989 (when the NBA changed to the two-round format) has produced at least three All-Stars, but maybe just not always in the most expected spots. Each of those drafts also turned out at least one All-NBA player, up through 2019. The 2020 class will get there this spring when Anthony Edwards makes all-league.

Next up for the Jazz: go and try to find a draft gem or two.

A sincere thanks to all those who followed along with these columns week to week. They are often very time-consuming to produce, and every year I tell myself I’m going to think really hard about whether to keep doing them, but I just can’t quit. Hopefully you get something out of these weekly check-ins.

An enthralling summer is coming for the Jazz.

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