Center Stage: Deciding Factors As Gobert’s Jazz and Jokic’s Nuggets Collide

August 16th, 2020 | by Dan Clayton

Unstoppable force, meet immovable object. At the center of Jazz-Nuggets is an intriguing individual matchup.

At the center of the playoff series that opens Monday between the Utah Jazz and Denver Nuggets is one of the most intriguing individual matchups in the NBA. Rudy Gobert and Nikola Jokic bring very different strengths to the NBA court, but both are firmly top-15 players at their best, as evidenced by their all-league selections. One is an offensive savant, perhaps the most skilled passer and shooter at his position. The other is one of the league’s top roll threats and also a dominant force at the other end, capable of taking games over defensively.

They’re yin and yang, a microcosm of the concept of duality. It’s like each one was created in a lab specifically to test and try the other.

That’s why it’s extremely fun to watch the two go to battle. Gobert wins a round, then Jokic answers, two heavyweights going right at each other, each with strengths and weaknesses that line up to the other’s weaknesses and strengths. I’ve seen Jazz fans convinced that Gobert has Jokic’s number, and Nuggets fans who think Jokic has owned Gobert. The truth is: both groups are suffering from severe selective memory here, because as SCH contributor and Jazz Twitter fixture Riley Gisseman shows us, the gravitational pull in this unique rivalry is so strong that neither star center can quite escape the other.

A single point. After all the battles and moments, big shots and signature blocks, one point separates this duo. In 14 head-to-head matchups, the win count is 8-6 in favor of Gobert. The Stifle Tower took the first three. Then they split the next four. Jokic got the next one, then Gobert reeled off another three straight. Jokic took all three this season, all in games decided by one to two possessions. They just can’t escape each other, just as two opposite poles of a magnet have a hard time gaining separation.

And that’s just the beginning of what makes the upcoming Jazz-Nuggets series enthralling.

Both squads feature dynamic scoring guards — Denver’s Jamal Murray and Utah’s Donovan Mitchell, each one coming off a career-best scoring season. Both have headband-wearing defensive pests in Royce O’Neale and Torrey Craig. Both run offenses built around a lethal pick-and-roll combination, flanked by capable shooters.

The similarities keep going. Denver, as Jokic has risen to stardom, has primarily been an offensive squad, with a top-five offensive efficiency in each of the last four seasons, but an average to below-average defensive rating. The Jazz were, again, the polar opposite, until they made trade-offs to shore up their ability to score. A perennial top-3 defense until this year, Utah prioritized shooting and creation in their recent personnel moves and moved into the top 10 for NBA offense, even thought that move cost them a slide back to the 13th spot defensively. In other words, they’ve purposefully made moves to become more Nuggetsy. Denver ended the season fifth in offense, 16th on D. Utah ended ninth and 13th.

Then there’s the fact that Utah’s two top stars were drafted for the Jazz by the Denver Nuggets: Gobert in the 2013 draft and Mitchell in 2017. The Nuggets had other priorities those summers, so they swapped those picks to Utah in exchange for three players who no longer wear Denver blue, and cash. Meanwhile, Denver’s starting forward is Paul Millsap, a second-round find by the Jazz who developed into a starter in Utah before becoming an All-Star in Atlanta, where Jazz coach Quin Snyder was an assistant.

So yeah, these two teams were destined for this moment. They were meant to compete against each other, to vie for Rocky Mountain supremacy, and All-NBA center supremacy, and everything else that comes with this enthralling rivalry.

This should be fun.

So how will one these teams, inexorably linked with their diametrically opposed stars parallel rosters and philosophies, escape the other’s vortex?

Here are a few stats and trends that signal what Utah must do to make this a series.

Avoiding Bad Switches

In their latest matchup, the Jazz took an 18-point advantage over the Nuggets as Gobert stifled and stymied his Serbian counterpart. Then, in the second half, Denver chipped away at the lead, partially by forcing awkwards switched as they took away the help in their high pick-and-roll with Jokic and Murray.

Jokic shot 6-for-15 in that game while guarded by Gobert, and the Nuggets’ managed 1.15 points per possession on those plays1. Against all other Jazz defenders, Jokic shot 4-for-6 and the team points per possession jumped to 1.65. This was also true of the two previous matchups. On February 5, Jokic shot 8-for-16 against Gobert with 1.02 team points per possession, and shot 5-for-7 against all other defenders while the Nuggets scored 1.96 per possession. A week earlier, he shot 8-for-14 with 1.01 team efficiency while Gobert had him, but 3-for-5 and 2.03 against other Jazz defenders.

The Jazz have to do their best to keep Gobert on Jokic. If the Nuggets are successful at forcing switches, Utah just doesn’t have anybody else who can reliably slow down the offensively gifted center.

Gang Defensive Rebounding

Gobert attending to Jokic means he’s going to spend a lot more time away from the defensive paint than he’s used to. That means other players are going to have to help Gobert close out the defensive possession by securing rebounds.

For the season, Gobert grabbed 27.6% of all available defensive rebounds while he was on the floor. Against the Nuggets, that figure dropped to 20.5%, one of his lowest opponent splits. Obviously the need to chase Jokic outside comes with a cost.

Millsap, Miles Plumlee and Craig are all good at sniffing out these opportunities when the opponent’s big is too far from the glass, and with Utah now forced to play smaller with Bojan Bogdanovic out, those three will be lurking. In particular, Craig extended several Denver possessions in last Saturday’s second half, allowing the Nuggets extra chances as they were carving away an 18-point deficit. All told, Denver rebounded 13.6% of their misses in the first half, and then 32.1% in the second half. It was a huge part of how the game swung back in Denver’s favor.

A lot of teams — including the Jazz — have made the very en vogue decision to prioritize transition defense over second chances on offense. Not Denver. They are the third best offensive rebounding team in the league by percentage of non-garbage time misses they snag themselves, and the best among the league’s 16 playoff teams. But that also contributes to Denver being ninth worst at letting the other team run off its live misses.

Utah, meanwhile, ranks sixth at limiting opponent offensive boards, so this is definitely going to be an area where something’s gotta give. On average, teams grab about 25% of their own misses, and that might be a good bellwether in this series. The Nuggets are 20-7 when their OReb% is 30% or better, and a far more pedestrian 26-20 when they’re held closer to the median.

Getting Mitchell Going

Mitchell was tremendous at the close of regulation and into both overtimes, repeatedly hitting tough shot after tough shot to give Utah a chance. From the :07 mark in the fourth quarter through the end of the game, he scored 20 points on 13 shots, got to the line five times and played without a single turnover. 

But before that final 10:07, Mitchell had shot 16-for-56 (28.6%) against the Nuggets this year, with 4.3 turnovers for every 36 minutes played. Denver has done a really good job of frustrating Mitchell, to the tune of 37 total points on 56 shot attempts before his explosion at the end of Saturday’s contest.

Craig has done a nice job in his individual matchups on Mitchell, and the Nuggets have also been smart about where and when to throw extra bodies in front of the All-Star guard. With Bogdanovic out — and now with news hot off the presses that Mike Conley will also miss at least a couple of games for the birth of his child — the Jazz simply can’t afford to get off games from Mitchell and still win games in this series. 

One of the ways they’ve generated opportunities for Mitchell is by having other guards screen for him. Denver is prepared with all kinds of helping schemes for the traditional Mitchell-Gobert high P&R, but by throwing little rub screens and other disguised picks in, they can force some switches and get the longer Craig off of him

All three of these plays are great wrinkles:

  • On the first one, Gobert is coming up to screen, but Mitchell actually waves him away and asks for the O’Neale pick instead. You can see that Craig wants to stay with Mitchell, but since Millsap is frozen in space, Craig has no choice but to retreat to O’Neale and leave Mitchell with the less mobile Millsap, who doesn’t even contest the pull-up.
  • The second one cuts off, but it might be my favorite of these three. Jordan Clarkon set a little disguised screen out front, and again, you can tell that Craig really doesn’t want to leave Mitchell. But Clarkson is open and is about to slip out past a Gobert flare screen, so Craig has to hurry back to him. And then Mitchell just cooks Monte Morris.
  • On the third play in this video, Jarrell Brantley looks like he’s going to take the handoff back from Gobert, a staple within the Jazz’s early setup. But he’s actually disguising an off-ball screen to bring Mitchell to the handoff, and by the time Craig realizes it, there’s nothing he can do.

Mitchell will also look for opportunities to attack Denver in transition.

Bench plus-minus

Bogdanovic being out already left the Jazz uncomfortably thin. Now Conley will miss time, which means the Jazz are going to need some unexpected contributions from somewhere. Clarkson — who has been a feast-or-famine type player since joining the Jazz midseason — is going to need to be more consistent, and a bench unit that has mostly struggled this year is going to need to hold things steady long enough for Gobert, Mitchell, O’Neale and Joe Ingles to get a quick rest.

The Jazz have fewer options to stagger starters in the with the bench unit, too. Throwing extra minutes to, say, Brantley or Miye Oni sounds fine in a vacuum, but that will leave the Jazz with some 5-man combinations that will be light on playoff experience, creation ability, and scoring. 

This is going to be a really interesting battle, from the Gobert-Jokic duel all the way down the roster. These teams are very evenly matched, despite what the 3-0 season sweep by Denver seems to indicate. The margins of those three wins were two points (in double overtime), three points and six points, and Utah actually held double-digit leads in all three outings before eventually falling. And with the neutral courts, any of these games could go either direction.

But this matchup seems foreordained. The similarities, the differences, the great individual matchups, the personal ties, the regional rivalry, the draft history — this was meant to be. And it probably won’t be the last time these teams stand in each other’s paths.

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