It’s Deja Vu For the Rigid Jazz While Fluid Phoenix Plays On

The Suns season continues on while the Utah Jazz deal with disappointment again. (Barry Gossage via suns.com)

We’ve all heard the mantra: you take what the defense gives you. NBA basketball is like a chess match: Team A chooses a plan of attack, Team B counters, Team A follows with a new plan of attack, and Team B counters again. If a style of play is working consistently to create good looks, you continue with the favorable play until your opponent sells out with a more susceptible counter. The NBA Playoffs are a larger battle of wits. Game plans are built with individual intricacies to each potential counter, planning ahead for how to beat your opponent’s next move. A systematic failure proves the downfall of the strongest contenders.

It’s been a rough three years for Jazz fans since a roster remodel that followed up a 2019 playoff defeat to the Houston Rockets. Fans were hopeful that an influx of offensive talent would help them avoid another series with horrific 26% shooting on 179 three-point attempts. Just three years later, Utah would find themselves shooting 27% on 179 attempts against the Dallas Mavericks in a postseason that lasted just one game longer than the 2019 failure the prompted a fairly major reconstruction.

The shooting woes are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg for frustrated Utah fans. In the span of three years, the Jazz blew a 3-1 series lead against Denver, a 2-0 series lead against the LA Clippers, and needed nothing short of a miracle to win game 4 against Dallas and lose “just” four of their last five appearances in this year’s playoffs. The Clippers and Mavericks were without Kawhi Leonard and Luka Doncic in five of those games, and Utah lost four of them.

It doesn’t stop there: Utah had a historically good point differential in 2021, but still didn’t reach a 60-win pace because they dropped games like candy; getting swept by the 23-win Timberwolves and losing two of those back-to-back, blowing important seeding games to Phoenix, trudging through the mud against the Lakers without Anthony Davis or LeBron James. Things were worse in 2022, where they blew 16 double-digit leads on the way to losses and didn’t even have a winning record after New Year’s.

Don’t get me wrong, there were flares of brilliance over this 3-year span: two 50-point games in a playoff series for Donovan Mitchell, an incredible 20-1 stretch over the course of a month and a half, a third DPOY for Rudy Gobert. Even better, the Jazz set records consistently: 154 points in a night, 17 three pointers in a half, three consecutive games with 20 or more three pointers. It was fun, too! Utah was the talk of the league, and even if some of that talk was skepticism, Jazz fans were treated with seeing whoever suited up prove the doubters wrong. Better yet, they responded with a tasteful and smug ‘Aight.’

The hike to the top of Utah’s peaks makes the heart wrenching ways in which they were upended all the more sour, I guess. I suspect many thought too highly of this group to want to have the lasting conversation about them be a question you might hear a toddler ask; “Why?”

To a point, it’s ugly, random chance. To another, it’s systematic failure. Let’s assume the latter.

What failed?

“You take what the defense gives you.” It’s rung in my ears since it was said in the Game 4 postgame interview given by Jazz head coach Quin Snyder. It describes a mindset of fluidity as opposed to rigidity. A rehearsed act no longer, improvisation skills reign king in the NBA playoffs.

Consider the Phoenix Suns’ star guard.

Chris Paul turned the corner, stopped abrupt, and fired. He hadn’t beaten C.J. McCollum enough off the dribble to give himself sufficient space for his patented 6-footer, so instead he let McCollum fly by and quickly launched an 8-footer perhaps two feet shy of where the defense expected him to be. Of course the shot falls. Paul, who turns 37 next week, is a master of on-court improvisation. He finds his spots with ease, living and dying by the mantra: “You take what the defense gives you.” It doesn’t stop there, either. Paul instilled a sentiment of fluidity among the Phoenix Suns as a whole; they dared take nearly half their shots from the mid-range and they still ended with the third best offense in the NBA. Phoenix would follow Paul’s lead in this Game 1 victory against the Pelicans after Paul tallied 19 of his 30 points in the fourth quarter.

What does this have to do with the freshly eliminated Jazz? Utah’s roster was created with a fatal flaw: a lack of fluidity. Because of that flaw, they couldn’t overcome woes on the offensive end, even while playing rather good defense in the final two games of the series.

To elaborate, the roster was built on the premise of stacking schematic offensive talent in a way that Utah would play their specific style of basketball and do it so well that they’d dare you to beat them at it. Switch our screens, we’ll find ways to get our 7-footer the ball at the rim, they said. Try taking away the rim roll with weak side help, we’ll beat you in rotation, they said. Don’t switch our screens, we’ve got some of the best pullup shooters in the NBA, they said. The Jazz had a firm identity and one that they enforced on opponents, beating them by being the best in the world at what they do. It was a system, where each player knew their roles and played them to near-perfection.

It was also a roster without compromises. The team’s downfall each season was due to their rigidity and unwillingness to change. This was especially evident on the defensive end, where the Jazz sacrificed perimeter defense for offensive talent, trusting the massive impact of three-time Defensive Player of the Year Gobert to cover. Teams figured this out, though. You can coax Rudy into defending the rim by simply beating your man in isolation, then beat the Jazz perimeter defenders in rotation. Gobert wasn’t the issue here, he was simply pulled out of the play so that opposition could attack the Jazz primary defensive weakness.

The rigidity also fueled problems offensively. As noted earlier, Utah’s roster build still shot just 27% from deep in their final playoff series. They failed to create rim looks, and even when they finally locked in on defense to cause Dallas to score just 110 points per 100 possessions over the final three games of the series, they came up short with their worst and 9th worst offensive nights of the entire season in games 5 and 6.

So who is to blame?

Well, everyone carries a little blame. Former GM Dennis Lindsey constructed a rigid roster. His successor Justin Zanik and the front office mishandled an offseason opportunity to retool key pieces within the offense and remove potential holes in the team’s game. It’s not that they didn’t try at all: how many previously-decent small ball centers does the coaching staff get to go through until we remove the benefit of the doubt? Rudy Gay seemed like a reasonably good pickup for a team looking for an insurance small ball center since he’d been really good at it the past few years! Gay also fell off so hard that he didn’t play a single minute in the postseason. Eric Paschall ended up being pretty reliable for short stints, but only saw 24 minutes in response to the Mavs’ smallball lineups with Maxi Kleber at center torching the Jazz.

The players themselves shoulder a brunt of the blame. It’s not like they can’t defend, in fact, the issue may have been more to do with effort on that end than the players’ abilities themselves. The rotations by the team defensively eventually looked tangentially good after they sleep-walked through games two and three, doing so poorly enough that I even questioned whether or not Snyder was deliberately instructing the players to leave specific shooters open. Mitchell tested out hero ball at times, Gobert got beat in one-on-ones a lot. Mike Conley was a turnstile on defense and shot 20% (yikes) from three for the series. Danuel House Jr., a fan favorite, often looked lost on the defensive scheme. Royce O’Neale struggled heavily with Jalen Brunson to the point he was ironically being hunted for switches with Bojan Bogdanovic. Bogdanovic was mostly good, but what in the world are you shooting a tough pullup 30-footer for, let alone with just a minute and a half left on the clock?

There were mistakes left, right, up, down, inside, and outside whatever constitutes the “team”. From roster construction to coaches to players, the Utah Jazz whiffed two out of three times when given extremely positive circumstances and then had to fight and claw to win just one of the next three games against a fierce playoff Luka Doncic. It was a damning nail in the coffin.

There was still something I liked to see as the clock wound down in the final game of this iteration of the Utah Jazz. O’Neale hustled on defense and caused an illegal screen. Mitchell found Gobert.  Bogdanovic was given the game winning attempt and everyone was okay with it. Jordan Clarkson screened off Bogie’s man on a set out-of-bounds play. Even long-lost fan favorite Joe Ingles remarked that the play produced a great shot for the (usually) sharpshooting forward.

And man, what a play Q drew up for that last shot. JC screen was perfect, we have all seen Bogie make that shot so many times.. Everyone in that locker would have him take that shot again… just the way it is sometimes!

— Joe Ingles (@Joeingles7) April 29, 2022

The Jazz wanted to win this game, and you could see that each individual was willing to do their part in order to do so. Those last five minutes were precisely how I wanted to see this team go out. No matter the round. No matter the game number. No matter the venue, nor the team they play. It wasn’t the whole season, nor the whole series, and it honestly wasn’t even the whole game, but my lasting image of this team will be of a team finally fighting in unison for just one more shot at having one more shot. Unlike a year prior, where they let go of a 25-point lead and lost by 12, they didn’t fold. They overcame their differences and fought together.

Even if only for a moment.

Note: Utah’s players opted out of doing locker room cleanout, a time to connect once more as a team and speak to media and front office members. This offers further proof of a locker room lacking maturity, accountability, and leadership. It also shows that the team fighting for a few minutes in their final moments of truth was not necessarily a group doing so for each other, but doing so to achieve their collective goal despite one another. Instead, they parted ways immediately as a team, once again pondering a collapse not all that different from the one they experienced three years ago.