Bold Takes Explored Part II: Modern Jazz, Moving Forward & Cosmic Forces

Just how good is Rudy Gobert? At least one tweeter says MVP-level good. (Yong Teck Lim via ESPN.com)

It’s time to celebrate the hottest, coldest and boldest Jazz takes out there.

We asked Jazz Twitter to share the boldest opinions on the Jazz that they actually believe, and we let Part I fly yesterday. That installment focused on the biggest what ifs throughout the ages of Jazz hoops, from New Orleans to the current squad. Some went so far as to dole out retroactive championship rings in the alternate universe.

Today we’ll explore more hot takes, but we’ll stick to the more modern era for a bunch of opinions that are less about “what if” and more just assertions about the reality of the recent or future Jazz. There are also theories in here about the Jazz going forward.

So don’t worry, Jazz fans: less rueful sobbing about the titles that might have been in this edition. Part III coming later.

Other Hoops-Related Takes on Recent Jazz History

Gobert has been an MVP caliber level player for the past 3 seasons.

@oldestfogey

He’s certainly been at the level where he should have gotten more MVP buzz, that’s for sure. By 538’s RAPTOR WAR metric, he’s a top-five player this season, trailing only megastars like James Harden, LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kawhi Leonard. He’s currently fourth in PIPM wins added, basically even with Kawhi and behind the other three. He has also been a top-five player by Win Shares in three of the past four seasons (although most statheads agree that WS isn’t a great way to gauge overall value, especially on the defensive end where Gobert contributes so much). Other all-in metrics like VORP (13th) and RPM (13th) tend to have him firmly in the All-NBA range, but just beyond the MVP ladder.

But yeah, it seems odd that someone who has been named the very best at something that makes up 50% of a basketball game (defense) for two years running doesn’t really get mentioned in the same breath as the guys who are among the very best at the other 50%. For better or worse, MVP tends to be focused on offensive stars, and on guys who really set the narrative for a particular NBA season.

I guess it just begs the question: why is a game-winning defensive stop worth any less than a game-winning bucket?

Favors is a better fit on this team than Rudy.

@justalars

After the 2019 playoffs, I once thought that the Jazz should trade Gobert and retain Favors.

@9540steph

Favors is actually Jesus. And he would have been an All-NBA player if he played in any era prior to 2008

@senorean

Handling these related entries together…

First of all, we just got done talking about how Gobert is firmly a top 10-15 player in the NBA in terms of overall impact. When you get someone that good, the question isn’t whether or not he “fits” your team, but rather who fits with him. All-league impact is by far the hardest thing to replicate or replace, so when you get a player at that level, that’s what you build around.

But these are really more about Favors than Gobert, so let’s talk about him. He’s a consistently above-average roll threat, piling up 1.11 points per possession finished as the roll man over the past five seasons combined, on over 900 such plays. That combination of efficiency and volume at one of the modern game’s most important play outcomes is extremely valuable. He’s also consistently above average as a paint protector, with aggregate rim FG% stats that are pretty close to Gobert’s — and even slightly better than the Stifle Tower’s in some stretches. He doesn’t deter quite as much as the big fella, but the pressure he applies at the rim on both ends of the court makes him extraordinarily valuable.

His post-up numbers have been solid on a per-possession basis, too, so I can see why @senorean thinks he got dropped in the wrong era. But I actually think P&R finisher is Fav’s best role on offense. Remember, he came into the league being compared to Amar’e Stoudemire, a springy and explosive finisher who found himself at the receiving end of about a million Steve Nash pocket passes and lobs. I think that’s really who Favors is, so I’m glad we get to watch him in the era of P&R-centric hoops.

Rubio/Gobert and Favors/Gobert worked, it was the trio of them that didn’t.

@oldestfogey

Here’s another one that’s not too hard to buy into.

In fact, I wrote about this early and often during Ricky Rubio’s tenure in Utah. Here’s a graphic I included in an article during the first season the trio played together.

A graphic from partway through the 2017-18 season, with data from stats.nba.com.

The numbers would shift slightly over the two years that these three shared a locker room, but the top-level summary was always the same: Utah was able to play winning basketball with any two of these three on the court, but struggled when all three played together. That’s not a particularly groundbreaking discovery, since the spacing issues of playing three non-outside shooters are fairly self-evident.

In particular, the success of the Gobert-Favors duo when Rubio sat is enough to make fans wonder what the offense might have looked like had the Jazz still dealt for Conley but found a way to keep Favors.

George Hill left the Jazz on bad terms because his agent convinced him he was getting ripped off.

It was a body language thing that happened in the middle of the season… At some point, he seemed unhappy and it was pretty random

@drawing_defense

Yeah, you’re not wrong. It wasn’t necessarily that he felt “ripped off” — after all, the Jazz preserved cap space that year so that they could offer him a pretty hefty renegotiation + extension which he declined so he could be courted in free agency. But the relationship did get a little strained toward the end, on a couple of fronts.

After a March 2017 road loss to the Clippers, a frustrated Gobert questioned the fire of some of his teammates, saying, “Some of us don’t compete… some of us just think about scoring.” Gobert didn’t single anybody out, but there were times in the course of that game when he was visibly frustrated at Hill, the Jazz’s second leading scorer that season. Hill then publicly rebuked Gobert for taking his beef to the media (“Methinks thou dost protest too much,” as the bard said), but Quin Snyder more or less supported the big fella.

“I welcome our guys challenging each other,” Snyder told the DNews at the time, although he also said Rudy could have offered his input more constructively. “The more we learn to communicate, the more we grow. The more competitive we become as a unit, the better we’ll get.”

Summary: Gobert calls out Hill, Hill blasts Gobert’s leadership, Snyder (sorta) stands behind Gobert, and later that spring the Jazz decide not to seriously court Hill for a new contract. Hmm. Even if that particular interaction after that particular game wasn’t a particularly big deal, it could just be symptomatic of Hill not being fully aligned with Utah’s best player. It’s one potential explanation for why the Hill-Jazz relationship seemed to shift.

The other theory out there is that some in the organization — including those close to Hill — may have been frustrated that he sat out most of the team’s second-round series. He was one of the heroes in the first-round upset of the Clippers, and I’ve heard smart people wonder if part of the reason he didn’t rush back is that he preferred to enter free agency with that shine still lingering, rather than help absorb four straight double-digit losses to the champs. (A propos of nothing, that also happened to the be the last year the Jazz had an external sports medical and clinical health partner. After three years of the external partnership, later that summer, the Jazz hired a new head of “performance health care” and a new trainer and brought the medical process back in house.)

It’s also worth remembering that Hill turned 31 that spring, and has never come close to equaling the career-best numbers he produced with the Jazz, even on a per-minute or per-possession basis. So there’s a case to be made that, in hindsight, it’s good the Jazz didn’t hitch their wagon to that horse just in time for his production to start declining.

Quin Snyder totally threw Kobe Bryant a bone in the 60 point final game vs Jazz.

@adam_bushman

Quite possibly, yeah. There was a ton of megastar deference happening in that game all around, starting with the fact that Kobe took more shots that night than any player took in a game in just over 49 years (!!). It was barely a real basketball game with the way it unfolded. It also didn’t matter much; the Rockets’ win earlier that evening made it impossible for the Jazz to do anything more than salvage a .500 record with a win at Staples that night.

Hot Takes About Moving Forward

I’m nervous about the Jazz in 2-3 years. We don’t have any other players on Mitchell’s timeline, few picks, and our best prospect right now is Brantley who projects to maybe be a rotation player. The rest of the roster is older.

@JazzJargon

You’re not wrong, but if I were to say anything to comfort you, it’s that where the Jazz are at right now is fairly normal for a competitive team.

Most legit contenders are by definition light in the asset department because they had to strategically cash in on their best assets to reach that tier. Golden State, Cleveland, Toronto and even the small-market Spurs were each in a similar position by their recent title seasons: capped out, spending only exception-level money on free agents, and with a number of outgoing pick obligations. That’s in part why the Jazz were so diligent about “asset accummulation mode” during their rebuild years, because they knew that eventually they’d reach a moment where they would have to push some chips to the middle of the table in order to turn the corner competitively.

What’s worrisome about the Jazz in this case is that they are probably borderline title contenders at this point, so they have leveraged themselves into this position without a clear path to make that last mini-jump from “on the cusp” to true contention. But there are still a few ways they can get there:

• Player improvements: Remember in 2013-14 when Leonard was considered a defensive specialist and burgeoning two-way threat who averaged 12.8 points on below-average usage in the regular season? Yeah, that same season he won Finals MVP, and now he’s widely considered a top-3 NBA player. Or remember how Antetokounmpo was a gifted but unrefined player who averaged just 12.2 points over his first three seasons? Yeah, now he’s the reigning MVP and leads the odds-on favorite to win the 2019-20 title. Moral of these stories: there was a point in the history of every alpha title hero when he… wasn’t that. Mitchell, Gobert and others aren’t done writing their stories yet, so we shouldn’t base an evaluation of the Jazz’s ceiling on who those players were the last time we saw them play. Guys get better, including some who make the megastar leap in a hurry.
• Untapped synergies: Remember that the current version of the Jazz — with Conley in his intended role and the current bench construction in place — has only played a dozen or so games together, and during the toughest schedule stretch of the season. We’re just starting to see how a fully operationalized Conley and the retooled bench can impact everything else, and even with all of those question marks, the Jazz are still ranked seventh in the league in win percentage. So there’s definitely some upside as the team continues to congeal.
• Moves around the margins: In each of the past two seasons, the Jazz have upgraded a rotation spot with a midseason trade (Kyle Kover and Jordan Clarkson) and then sprinted into a long stretch of winning. So while we tend to focus mostly on the top of the roster when assessing a team’s title strength, there are lesser moves that can shore up a team’s chances. For example, the current Jazz are light up front; would another rotational big man be enough to upgrade their status from “fringe contender” to “the Real McCoy”?

That’s just where they are as a team who has spent their wad to get to this level. You’re not wrong to be nervous about it, but there are ways forward from here, too.

Gobert could average 20+ a game if the guards would pass to him early in the shot clock when he’s open under the rim

@oldestfogey

Gobert has stayed pretty close to .680 True Shooting for the last four seasons, which means that a trip ending in a Gobert shot of free-throw trip is worth about 1.36 points. To get to 20 on that efficiency means he would need an extra 3.6 shooting possessions per night, assuming he could maintain his current efficiency even with a few more touches. 

That doesn’t sound too hard hard on the surface; an extra shot per quarter and he should be sniffing 20, right? But adding four shots to a player’s nightly diet is a BIG leap, one that few players make without sacrificing some efficiency. The biggest jump Gordon Hayward ever made on his road from gawky role player to bona fide star was from 12.5 shooting possessions in ’12-13 to 15.6 in ’13-14… and that three-shot jump came with a dip from .564 true shooting to .520. 

Also, Gobert already gets a ton of defensive attention from opponents. We can all think of times we’ve seen him standing baseline pointing at the rim for the lob, but the reality is it’s not like he’s currently flying under the radar in terms of scouting reports.

So I agree with you directionally — they should be trying to get to their most efficient offensive weapon more. But the jump from 15 to 20 in the NBA is a pretty hard jump to make.

Jazz brass can’t secure a commitment to re-sign from Gobert and are forced to trade him by next February.

@Clintonite33

Maybe. I will say that I think the only way they even consider trading him on his current contract is if they have a sense that he’s definitely not coming back. As I wrote above, top-15 players are really, really hard to replace.

I’ll also add that I was encourage by how reflective and self aware Gobert sounded in a recent Tim MacMahon piece over at the mothership. That piece wasn’t out when Clint submitted this take, but maybe the more contrite, solution-oriented, forward-focused Gobert that came through there quiets some of the concerns about his future… for now. 

When the NBA starts up again in a bubble, the whole league gets the ‘rona and Donovan and Rudy are the only really good players that are immune and we win a chip.

@jazzman3212

While we don’t really fully understand yet how COVID-19 immunity works, enough NBA players have been diagnosed now that it’s unlikely the Jazz stars will be the only ones still standing if things get out of hand in Orlando.

That said, this tweet is a good example of why this summer’s tournament is going to be subject to a lot of asterisk talk. Expect a lot of weird wrinkles.

Donovan Mitchell gave COVID19 to Rudy.

@pouchman27

Maybe. A week before Gobert’s positive test, Mitchell reconnected in the Big Apple with family and friends from Westchester County, NY, the site of one of the early COVID-19 hot spots.

It’s also just as likely that Gobert got it somehow and gave it to Mitchell. Or that they both contracted it separately, either from the same third party source or from two different infected individuals. I don’t think most fans realize just how many people an NBA player comes in contact with on a typical day, especially during a road trip. During the week that the pair likely contracted the virus, the Jazz zipped around to Cleveland, New York, Boston, Detroit (where they had contact with Christian Wood, who may have had the virus before either of the Jazz stars), then home to Salt Lake before heading back out to Oklahoma. That adds up to a lot of planes, buses, team staff, arena workers, airport security, media members, autograph seekers, hotel workers, food preparers, restaurant servers, etc. The number of places one or both of them could have come in contact with an asymptomatic carrier is pretty long, especially considering that it was near impossible to get a test at that point in time.

So it’s probably impossible to know who had it first. And honestly, I’m not sure it matters that much, either. 

Tin Foil Hats & Cosmic Forces

The NBA does not want a market like Utah winning a title and will influence the officials to keep it that way.

@spandexLarry

The ESPN The Magazine about how officials could fix games wasn’t hypotentical and there are reasons certain officials are assigned to certain games. Hugh Hollins to Laker games for example. ( I am not totally sure I believe this or do I?)

@bwfanzzz

Just since 2012, every NBA Finals except one has featured a team with an NBA market size rank of 20th or lower, and two of those franchises (the 20th ranked Cavs and the 26th ranked Spurs) have won a championship in that span.

But that’s not even the real reason I don’t believe in this particular brand of conspiracy theories… mostly it’s because if there was some secret alliance to control who wins championships, enough people would have to be involved for it to work that by now it would be an impossible secret to keep. I covered the NBA on credential from 2003 to 2014 (and on occasion since then) and I have friends and acquaintances who work on team staffs, in the league office and for some of the most widely respected media outlets. As far as I know, none of us has ever gotten any whiff of anything that would classify as competitively untoward. Wouldn’t that be nearly impossible if the NBA had the practice of anointing champions in the proverbially smoke-filled back room somewhere? 

And if they were going to do it based on market size alone, why would they be holding the 25th-ranked Utah Jazz back while allowing the 26th-ranked Spurs to win five titles since 1999? Also, the 27th-ranked Bucks are this year’s title favorites.

I think we are cursed because Stockton and Malone played dirty and we still ain’t even with the karma gods.

@ShamTambien

Solid point. How does Jazz Nation atone for the sharp elbows and nasty backscreens of its forefathers?

More coming in Part III as we delve into Jazz history once again.