Jazz-Grizz Parallels, Schemes and Possible G5 Wrinkles

Mitchell’s Jazz, up 3-1, have an opportunity to win their first closeout game since 2018. (via ESPN.com)

Not that long ago, the Utah Jazz were where the Memphis Grizzlies are today: a fun, gritty team playing with house money and led by a superstar blossoming ahead of schedule.

Like this year’s Grizzlies, the 2017-18 Jazz confounded expectations of a lengthy reset when a precocious, dynamic scoring guard announced himself as the real deal. Both Donovan Mitchell’s first Jazz squad and this Ja Morant-led Memphis outfit had a solid blend of talent and discipline, and made the playoffs when many thought they would need more time to congeal behind their respective young superstars.

The Jazz even took a series from Oklahoma City that year before confronting a behemoth in Houston. That series was a measuring stick that yielded both a 4-1 outcome and some instructive data about what they needed to round the curve and join the contender class. It looks increasingly unlikely that Memphis, now trailing three games to one, will advance past the first round, but that says as much about the nature of the Western Conference as anything. At a .585 winning percentage, those Jazz were able to line up across from a talented-but-flawed Thunder group before they faced the West’s best. The Grizzlies’ .528 record isn’t that far off from the 2018 Jazz, but their reward for finishing four games above .500 was to open against the team with the NBA’s best record.

Would Memphis’ fate of running into this Jazz buzzsaw land any differently if they had the opportunity to face a quasi-contender like Portland or Dallas first? And would that path be that different from what they did to get here, capping a 2-0 play-in round with a road win against Steph Curry’s Warriors?

No matter how their first-round series unfolds from here, there’s no shame for the Grizzlies here. Yes, they’ll likely come up short in this first postseason test against a juggernaut, just as the Jazz did in Mitchell’s first postseason. But their bright future has been on display. They’ve stayed in every game, and along the way they have showcased the talent, smarts and grit that should allow them to keep climbing, just as the Jazz did.

Barring any landscape-altering injuries or management own-goals, the Grizzlies should only get better in the medium term. Morant is 21 and improving. Dillon Brooks is so much more than a defensive pest whom opposing fans love to hate¹, and has established himself as a worthy sidekick. Jaren Jackson Jr. has a chance to be really good.

Around that group of youngsters, decisions will be made — both by management as they decide which young role players are part of the future core, as well as by veterans who will be coming up on crossroads soon. (Jonas Valanciunas is probably the third most important Grizzly at the moment, and he will be a free agent after next season.) They’ll have the option of creating cap space these next two summers, which they can either use to woo a difference-maker or to generate assets that might help them target complementary players later.

There are no guarantees. For the Jazz to round the corner, they had to take some marked risks, retooling their supporting cast around Mitchell and Rudy Gobert in ways that could have disrupted the on-court product and/or team chemistry. They added a third All-Star via trade and added guys who are elite in specific roles in other deft moves. In each case, they sacrificed someone who was an important part of the team’s defensive identity to add offensive firepower in Mike Conley, Bojan Bogdanovic and Jordan Clarkson. It has worked, but it could just as easily have backfired. Memphis will have to make those same types of decisions in the next few years. Going from good to great is hard.

But Memphis has been impressive, both in the way they earned themselves the right to participate in their own version of the 2018 Jazz’s measuring stick series, and the way they’ve clawed their way into four games. Much like that Jazz team from a couple of years ago, they’re ahead of schedule. Their future looks promising.

Guarding Ja

That future is predicated on Morant’s growth, and he’s also the key to the Grizzlies’ present. Guarding Memphis right now means making choices about how to deal with the 6-foot-3 guard who is already one of the game’s most exciting downhill finishers. Morant can get two feet in the paint almost any time he wants to, and when he does he bends even the best defenses in ways that generate the lion’s share of Memphis’ offense.

He’s already converted 36 baskets in the paint in this series. That’s one fewer than Phoenix center DeAndre Ayton, and far more than any non-big in the postseason through four games. And that’s without a consistent jump shot to pull defenders out to him.

The Jazz are so afraid of Morant’s paint forays that they’ll occasionally overcommit to walling off the drives, like they do here.

Conley goes under the screen and Gobert slides over to contain, but for some reason Clarkson still leaves a shooter to stunt. You probably don’t need three guys all focused on Morant when he’s this far from the basket, but that just illustrates how much fear he instills as a drive threat.

By and large, though, the Jazz executed a fairly consistent game plan in Game 4. Through the first three games, the Jazz appeared to be intent on not selling out elsewhere to stop Morant, so they played a slightly more conservative scheme and brought less help. In broad terms, it worked — they were up 2-1, after all — but Morant poured in 33.7 points per game on 60% true shooting through three.

So in Game 4, we saw the Jazz get a bit more focused on limiting the star guard. Royce O’Neale, Morant’s primary defender, went under a lot of screens, particularly when Morant was going toward the sidelines. When O’Neale and others did pursue over the top of screens, the Jazz involved the bigs a bit more actively.

When Gobert was guarding the screener, that typically meant having the big guy wait for Morant at the free throw line, as opposed to dropping further back like he did earlier on in the series. He would show there and then generally backpedal to stay in front of Morant while accounting for a rolling Valanciunas or Jackson. To the star guard’s credit, Morant was still able to find the sweet spot where he could still fire his deadly floater against a retreating Gobert:

These three plays are almost identical in terms of Ja’s path to the top of the right-side slot and Gobert’s defensive response. Gobert’s practically begging Morant to shoot some of those, and that might seem a tad too passive against a guy who is shooting 57% in the paint in this series. But ultimately, Utah is willing to play Gobert this way because they know it will also result in Morant occasionally making mistakes, taking tougher shots, or putting the ball in someone else’s hands. Like on this set of plays:

Gobert guards essentially the same way on these four plays as he did in the trio above, but here it results in a floater barely drawing iron, a Morant turnover, and two plays where they get the ball out of his hands entirely. But for a sloppy closeout by Clarkson on the last one, these would be four empty Memphis possessions.

That’s what we mean when we say Utah is playing the percentages. They’ll live with Ja taking some floaters over Gobert’s 9-foot-7 standing reach, and they’ll even be OK if a few go down. Because they know that strategy is going to slow the Memphis offense down just enough over time.

By contrast, they generally asked Derrick Favors to guard even more aggressively as the P&R defender. Favors doesn’t quite have the length to guard two guys as effectively when Morant and the ball handler both come rolling down hill, so they had him show higher than Gobert, even coming up to the level of the screen on several occasions while the guard recovered. The smart counter to that is for Morant to try to force a switch, which he did on a handful of plays. But Favors actually acquitted himself well when switched onto Morant 1-on-1:

It’s hard to call those successful when Memphis got five points out of the three possessions pictured there. But the point here is that Favors did his job well after Morant forced him into switching on an outside hedge. Had perimeter defenders not fallen asleep after Favors dead-ended Morant on the first and third drives, Memphis would have had to settle for someone else creating on a short shot clock. (Morant also hit one stepback three over Favors on a switch. Again, the Jazz will play the percentages there; that was his only three of the game, and he shot 30% on off-the-bounce triples in the regular season.)

There’s some stuff you have to give up if you’re going to have the bigs come out higher on Morant. That’s at least partially why he finished the game with a dozen assists. As the game went on, Memphis tried other action to let Morant operate outside of these Jazz schemes: they ran more guard-to-guard picks late, and they called for more screening away from the ball. Utah mostly adjusted quickly to all of this in their best overall defensive game of the playoffs.

Ultimately, what they were doing earlier in the series was working too, at least in a 5-on-5 sense. Their goal isn’t to stop Morant from scoring, it’s to defeat the Grizzlies. That said, their Game 4 adjustments allowed them to do both: they slowed the dynamic scorer down to his lowest (and least efficient) output of the playoffs, and they held held Memphis under .92 points per possession in a half court setting². Their overall DRtg of 112 was their best so far in the series.

That Morant is already commanding this amount of game planning attention at 21 and without an outside shot is remarkable. He is already the type of offensive force who sets the terms of engagement just by how he plays and what opponents choose to do with him. If he ever develops a consistent pull-up jumper, he could be really scary to deal with in no time at all.

In the meantime, his job is just to try to keep his Grizzlies alive, 48 minutes at a time — starting with Game 5.

Game 5 wrinkles

The Jazz know as well as anybody that closeout games are hard. They have lost three straight in which they had an opportunity to advance, all in last year’s first round series against Denver.

But, with all due respect to Memphis, this isn’t the Denver series. The gap in macro team quality is wider, and the games aren’t happening in a neutral gym next to some Central Florida marsh. Plus, while Utah has yet to blow the Grizzlies out, they’ve been in control for virtually every minute since Mitchell returned to action. In the three games since Mitchell rejoined the lineup, Utah is 3-0 and has trailed for just 5.6% of the time. Utah has trailed for 38 total seconds after intermission in those games, or 0.9% of the total second-half action in those three. Credit Memphis for staying in all three games, but Utah has yet to really sweat one out, at least with their full roster.

So what could Game 5 look like? The Grizz could play with even more urgency than they showed the Jazz in fourth quarter comebacks in Games 3 and 4… or reality could start to set in and they could let go of the rope.

From a scheme standpoint, it would be odd for Utah to go back to allowing Morant more freedom after a successful game plan in Game 5, but expect Memphis to be ready with some countermeasures. If the bigs are going to continue to creep out to pick Morant up in space, the Grizz will try to force uncomfortable switches. They can also rescreen to the outside in the hopes of tugging the big fellas out towards the elbows, although so far that’s an area of the floor where the Jazz have been fine sending minimal help to Morant’s man.

One option is to take Valanciunas and Jackson out of some pick-and-rolls. The problem there is that it allows Gobert to roam a bit more on defense, and so far the Grizzlies haven’t really been able to punish the Jazz on plays where Gobert plays free safety behind some guard-to-guard screening action.

At some point, shots like that have to go down if Memphis wants to force the Jazz to defend a certain way.

On the other end, Memphis has been able to limit Utah’s rim attempts *or* outside attempts, but not both in the same game. The Jazz got off a boatload of threes off in Games 1 through 3, and when they finally shot a more average number in G4 (37% of their shots), it’s because they were able to take nearly a third of their shots in the restricted area.

There are no easy answers for Memphis, on either end. They’ve switched, they’ve iced, they’ve dropped, they’ve hedged, and Utah has just had answers for everything. Conley has been a surgeon in this series, and Mitchell is inching back toward his usual minutes and role. O’Neale, Bogdanovic and Joe Ingles have all been red hot as endpoints of the offense, and the Jazz have too many avenues of creation for Memphis to zero in on any one ball handler.

We’ll see what the Grizzlies try. We’ll see if the Jazz come out determined to exorcise their closeout game demons. But either way, the Grizzlies are at an interesting point in the journey — one the Jazz of all teams should recognize.