All Mistakes Are Not Created Equal: Why the Jazz Can Live With Some Turnovers

Passes that can lead to finishes like this are worth some amount of risk, the Jazz believe. (Rocky Widner via espn.com)

During the second half of the Utah Jazz’s final game of 2018, Joe Ingles curled into the lane and something familiar happened. A rolling Derrick Favors had attracted a help defender on the back side of the play, so Rudy Gobert raised both his arms, signaling to the Aussie ball handler that he was open at the rim. Ingles floated a pass toward the big man, but just then, Gobert’s defender slid back in front and stole the ball. It was one of eight passing turnovers the Jazz would have by the end of the night, and their 17 total turnovers against the Knicks were tied for their 10th highest miscue total of the season.

And they won by 32.

In the next game, the Jazz opened 2019 with their lowest turnover output of the season, and the third lowest by any NBA team this year. They lost the ball just four times against the Raptors — and they never held a lead larger than a single possession margin. The Jazz trailed for the game’s final 23 minutes and left Toronto with their 20th loss.

Zoom out beyond the anecdotal evidence of the Jazz’s two most recent games and you’ll see a similar theme. The Jazz are actually 5-11 their games with 14 or fewer turnovers. That doesn’t mean that turnovers are good, but certain turnovers are a result of a behavior that generally leads to good offense: aggressive, high-reward passing. In fairness, they’re also 1-4 in their highest turnover games, but that means there’s a definite sweet spot, and Utah is 12-5 when they find it.

There’s such a thing as the *right* kind of mistake. Because Basketball-Reference.com allows us to mine by turnover type, we can see the effect that different kinds of errors have on an offense. Teams that have low passing turnover numbers often aren’t executing forcefully enough, instead settling for shots and passes that don’t put a lot of pressure on the defense.

Non-passing turnovers (we’ll call them NPTOs for shorthand) actually have a decent correlation to bad offense; if you rank all 30 teams by the percent of their possessions that end in a NPTO (i.e. an offensive foul, out-of-bounds play, travel or shot clock violation), you’ll see a decent negative correlation to teams’ overall true shooting. The team with the highest NPTO% (Detroit) has the 2nd-worst true shooting offense, and the team with the 2nd most (Chicago) has the third-worst. The teams with the fewest possessions ending that way — Charlotte, San Antonio and Golden State — rank 16th, 7th and 1st in true shooting and have the ninth, fifth and second best offenses overall. Limiting those kinds of turnovers is generally good for an offense¹

But the same correlation doesn’t exist between passing turnovers (PTOs) and offensive efficiency. The teams with the highest PTO% figures rank 23rd, 21st, 9th, 1st and 14th in true shooting, and the teams with the lowest figures rank. The teams who rarely end possessions with a PTO rank 22nd, 7th, 10th, 29th and 20th in TS%. It’s all over the map²

In other words, passing turnovers aren’t necessarily bad. In fact, there’s an extremely strong correlation — 0.85, or an R-squared of 0.72 — between teams’ ranks for PTOs per game and potential assists per game³. The same behavior that often leads to PTOs — assertive, daring passes — can also lead to good offense. Across the league, nearly one of every six passes becomes a potential assist, while only 2.3% of passes result in a passing TO, and there’s not a ton of variance from team to team on either number. A team that passes more will commit more turnovers that way, but they’ll also create more good looks for their team.

That’s why the Utah Jazz braintrust can generally stomach certain TOs. Dennis Lindsey told the Salt Lake Tribune earlier this season: “At times, the risk to create a shot can be high. So when you do make interior passes, turnovers happen. So what type of turnovers are we willing to accept? To me, [interior pass turnovers] are acceptable, because Rudy [Gobert] and Derrick [Favors] are such formidable finishers.”

Per Cleaning the Glass, Gobert and Favors each shoot around 71 percent at the rim⁴, a big part of why they rank in the 94th and 83rd percentile, respectively, for effective field goal percentage among big men. So any pass designed to create an opportunity for those two to score down low is worth a certain amount of risk, at least according to Lindsey. For example, that pass described in the opening paragraph is a mistake the Jazz can live with.

To be clear, this isn’t a great play. Because Ingles drives toward the trap on Dante Exum, he gives Favors’ defender a chance to get back into the play. And Favors and Gobert are too close together, giving Luke Kornet the chance to be arms-length away from both. But Lindsey’s point is that the mindset that led Ingles to make this pass is a mindset that, more often than not, will result in points. This is a mistake the Jazz will live with. The alternative to this type of turnover is to simply decline to put pressure on the defense. When the Jazz do that, the offense gets stuck.

There’s a reason why the Jazz’s turnover leaders are also their main shot creators: Ingles, Donovan Mitchell and Rubio. When those three are putting pressure on the defense and trying to create good looks for their teammates, miscues will occasionally happen, but they are mistakes that the Jazz won’t mind as much.

Again, it’s easy to point out how each of those passes might have been executed better, but the mindset that led to each of those turnovers also leads to a LOT of dunks for Gobert and Favors. The two have combined for 210 slams this season⁵, and the vast majority of them (73% in both guys’ cases) have been assisted.

There are a lot of times when these passes are way too imprecise, when the timing is off, or when the passer tries to force a pass when the angle just isn’t there. These aren’t good outcomes, let’s be clear about that. But good offenses will take the right kind of risks, and being bold about getting the ball to big men at the rim definitely classifies as the right kind of risk.

On the other hand, not every passing mistake comes from a high-risk, high-reward scenario. Some are just bad ideas, especially when Jazz ball handlers are above the free-throw line extended and throw a careless lateral pass out front. These are ugly mistakes that almost always result in the other team getting a great look or drawing a foul. And each of Utah’s main ball handlers has been guilty of this.

A pass back out to the perimeter should be the offense’s safety valve, a place you look when there’s nothing there and you just need to reset the offense and try again. Passes like this turn the safety net into the worst-case scenario: a chance for the other team to steal a live ball with their momentum going toward the other end. That’s the worst possible outcome for Utah, a team that allows just 105.1 points per 100 halfcourt possessions and 117.3 in transition following a miss, but 128.0 off of a live steal.

The good news: the Jazz are getting better at cleaning up these transition-initiating bad passes. Heading into Friday’s game in Cleveland, only 57% of steals by a Jazz opponent have led to a transition play, the lowest figure in the league. That’s because the Jazz have cut some of these really bad ones out of their diet. Rubio had a lot early in the season, but he has cleaned it up. I had to go clear back to the week before Thanksgiving to find an example of one of these above-the-break, pass-backward turnovers. But other Jazz ball handlers can still clean these up. Even the bigs are guilty of the occasional errant pass when they handle the ball at the top of the key to start the offense. 

But by and large, errant passes aren’t the worst thing that can happen to the Jazz’s offense. The worst thing they can do is stop trying to puncture the defense with challenging, sometimes even daring, passes.