Jingles or JC: Sixth Man Debate Centers On Utah Bench Duo

May 18th, 2021 | by Mark Russell Pereira

Two of the league’s top reserves have helped the league-leading Jazz to a 52-20 record. (Harry How via espn.com)

As good as the Utah Jazz are, the team’s rise from a decent playoff team to a 60-win pace season is primarily driven by a high-powered collectivism of the entire unit. Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert (and others) have had dominant performances, but they are not quite singular driving forces to victory to the same degree as a LeBron James or Giannis Antetokounmpo.

To that end, Utah’s championship contention relies heavily on two bench contributors that lead the race for the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year award: Good Vibe Tribe co-proprietor Jordan Clarkson, and everybody’s favorite trash-talking, smooth-shooting forward Joe Ingles. Both are vital to Utah’s title hopes, but who deserves the award?

Jordan Clarkson

Clarkson has been the overwhelming favorite to win the league’s top bench honor for the majority of the regular season, buoyed by an electrifying start. His red hot intro was capped by a 40-point explosion against the Philadelphia 76ers in February that included a barrage of absurdly difficult shots. Just look at some of these downright silly buckets:

But recent cracks have developed in his award resume due to a recent, extended stretch of shooting woes and the (overdue) recognition of the well-rounded success of Ingles. Since Clarkson is no longer putting up the same mind-numbingly amazing numbers at the start of the season, how does his case hold up under scrutiny?

For much of the Quin Snyder era, and especially over the past two seasons, the Jazz offense has been rote. Not to say it was simple or easily defended, but for opposing defenses it was akin to difficult classical music: predictable, and, with practice and skill, solvable. There will be occasional cadenzas, like supernova clutch stretches from Donovan Mitchell and whatever it was Emmanuel Mudiay was doing throughout the 2019-20 season. And this year’s explosive, euphoric plethora of off-the-dribble threes doesn’t really count as unpredictability when it’s a game-in, game-out occurrence by every non-center on the roster.

That’s where Jordan Clarkson comes in, to smash all expectations of a defense. He is John Cage1 interpreting a Quin Snyder sonata.

Sure, Clarkson has his own brand of predictability, in that he has a score-first/second/third mentality and everyone in the building knows it. But defenders can never predict how Clarkson intends to get a bucket on any given possession, just like you never know exactly what insane stuff you’re going to hear (or not hear) from a Cage piece. At the end of the season, Clarkson composed a ridiculous 18.3 points off the bench—among the best bench scoring seasons in league history—on top of 4.0 rebounds and 2.5 assists.

However, Clarkson’s unpredictable brand also begets inefficiency. He can score in ways most players—even offensively-skilled players—simply cannot. Since enough of Clarkson’s difficult shot attempts go in, and Snyder encourages Clarkson’s freedom, Clarkson will continue to shoot difficult shots in higher quantities than most. Obviously, plenty of these attempts still miss, and so JC ends up posting inefficient shooting splits.

But it’s not just difficult shots leading to inefficiency. For example, per NBA.com’s tracking data, Clarkson also shoots just 38% on 2.4 “wide open” three point attempts per game, which isn’t great considering league average is 39% on such shots (as a team, Utah shoots 42.4%). For a significant period of the regular season finishing stretch run, Clarkson wasn’t shooting well from anywhere on the court against whatever good or bad defense was there. He is the team’s best free throw shooter2, but doesn’t draw enough contact (2.1 free throw attempts per game) to boost a below-average true shooting percentage3.

Yet despite being inefficient by league standards, he kept shooting, dribbling, and shooting some more. To his own credit on the efficiency side, Clarkson absolutely prioritizes attempts in the paint and beyond the arc, keeping the most disastrous shots out of the equation. He’s a high-variance player, to be sure, but his shot profile means that the highs are easier to come by and the lows still puts the right kind of pressure on a defense.

So Snyder and the team continue to trust him. Not once have you heard a teammate mention with any seriousness that Clarkson needs to pass more or dribble less in order for the team to succeed. At least a dozen times per game, Clarkson will be the sole ballhandler on a possession, in which he gobbles up a huge chunk of the shot clock on his way to a meandering contested paint push shot or stepback three. And if Snyder’s offense doesn’t generate a shot in the first 16 seconds of the shot clock, you will surely see the team toss the ball to JC and let him cook.

There is value in that, as objectively inefficient as it may be. The value is just more subjective in nature.

There have been many quarters where the Jazz have had dead legs and are borderline unwilling to facilitate the offense effectively. Clarkson is always willing to handle the ball and find a shot, and will do so possession after possession. He is indefatigable to a ridiculous degree only rivaled on the entire team by Gobert. Clarkson usually prefers to get into the paint via feints and angling, rather than by speed or hard dribbles, which can sometimes be fruitless early in games against rested and prepared defenses. But, by the end of the game, Clarkson’s determination and effort doesn’t decrease, and he finds advantages against tired defenders who aren’t able and/or willing to defend an entire shot clock’s worth of his antics. It’s no coincidence he’s had a number of memorable and scintillating second half performances.

These efforts still might be inefficient on the whole, but it is extremely plausible—if not probable—that most of those possessions being taken by dead Jazz legs or inferior players wouldn’t fare much better on that front. In the playoffs, you might see defenses intentionally funnel shot attempts to Clarkson to exacerbate the inefficiency. But for the Jazz to rack up the wins in a truncated post-coronavirus regular season, they desperately needed a guy like Clarkson to soak up the shot attempts and minutes in those dreary mid-season games. And, lest we forget, this is a regular season award.

There is also a generally positive je ne sais quoi about Clarkson’s presence—a vibe, if you will. His demeanor and scoring ability clearly inspires and excites his teammates, and the crowd buzzes when he’s alone on the wing. Remember when Joe Johnson would get Jamal Crawford switched onto hopelessly defending him in the 2017 playoff series against the Clippers, and how the temperature would immediately start to rise? Clarkson instills that palpable tremor nearly every damn time he touches the ball. He’s cool as hell:

You’ll see him allow a back-door cut or get too cute trying to navigate a screen, but he usually gives a shit on defense, which is an acceptable floor with Gobert on the court (less acceptable with Derrick Favors, who he is paired with ~45% of the time). He has advanced passing chops when he’s seeing the floor well, which admittedly comes and goes.

So Clarkson’s candidacy for the Sixth Man of the Year award is obviously not about brutalist efficiency or an all-around game that raises the floor of bench units, but rather how well he filled a scoring void on a team primed for excellence and provided emotional inspiration. His presence, effort, and putting the ball in the damn bucket matters, all to a degree certainly worthy of the league’s top bench honor.

Joe Ingles

Amidst a Clarkson shooting slump that extended 30+ games, folks started to note Ingles’ contributions off the bench when crafting initial lists of Sixth Man candidates. Underneath the fanfare ostensibly predestined for Clarkson, is Ingles Utah’s actual premier bench contributor?

Ingles’ style is nothing new, but he has improved his skill every season, and this improvement has shone brightly in the past two seasons in a joint role of supersized backup point guard and wing complement when the starting star guards return to the floor.

As an older rookie in 2014, Ingles was frequently found meekly passing up wide open looks in fear of making a mistake or simply missing. But building off of his core skills of passing vision, guile, and shooting, that hesitancy has disappeared in favor of an onslaught of hilariously aggressive off-the-dribble threes and savvy drives to the paint (to the left hand and the right this year!). Ingles excels as a primary initiator of the offense on the second unit without losing his luxury effect as a quaternary role with the starters in the fourth quarter. He serves as an invaluable glue for the Jazz who seamlessly floats between lineups in different roles. That flexibility is so beneficial for a bench player—many substitutes are immediately miscast when asked to extend their ballhandling or increase their defensive responsibilities.

Yet Ingles delights in leading bench actions with either Favors or Gobert setting the screens, and keeps the pressure on the defense as a deadly shooter and secondary ballhandler when Mike Conley Jr. and Mitchell re-enter the game. Ingles still doesn’t draw many fouls, but he’s dialed up his free throw percentage to 84.4% after years of mid- to low-70s, making his drives to the rim more effective.

Which leads us to other percentages and metrics, especially Ingles’ literally historic shooting efficiency. Ingles’ recent increased burden as a fill-in starting point guard tugged his true shooting percentage down to 67%, but for most of the season he was scratching 70%. To put that in perspective, virtually all of the players in league history who flirt with 70% are big men who exclusively shoot around the rim (think Rudy Gobert). The lone exceptions are some of the league’s best shooters in all of its history, like Kyle Korver and Duncan Robinson. An open Ingles three is almost as valuable and reliable as a dunk—a rare and insane concept to digest.

Ingles started a huge chunk of games, seemingly flouting the intent of the award. But the best Sixth Man of the Year winners include players who consistently closed games in the clutch as part of a team’s best 5-man unit, even if they did not start the game. The spirit of the honor includes a tacit acknowledgment that the winner is good enough to start, but the team construct compels that he enters the game off the bench; it naturally follows that voters shouldn’t necessarily discount a bench player’s minutes as a starter—and successful minutes, at that—due to injuries to starters. And while Utah’s starters are generally their closers, the Jazz wouldn’t lose a beat with Ingles closing in place of Bojan Bogdanovic or Royce O’Neale. Snyder immediately turns to Ingles upon any non-Gobert absence to the starting unit, which is indicative of the quality and skill of Ingles.

Ingles posted an insane raw +/- of +454 (4th in the NBA; Jordan Clarkson was a very good +301); this includes his starts, which boosts the stat, but he also recorded a raw +/- of 155 in 37 games off the bench and an overall on/off difference of +2.2 per 100 possessions; both of which are very difficult marks to achieve for a player who played most of his games with bench units. Ingles is undoubtedly a winning basketball player in whatever role he’s given.

However, a real issue for voters is whether Ingles simply started too many games, in a manner that goes beyond fulfilling the spot starter/closer role expected of the best bench players. Ingles’ baseline numbers off the bench were relatively subdued, posting (an extremely efficient!) 9.9 points, 3.5 rebounds, and 3.9 assists in his bench games. Ingles’ role and impact off the bench is more important than those raw counting stats would indicate, but such numbers also fall short of the award-winning figures that serve as a typical baseline. It is obviously normal for a bench player’s counting stats to increase when starting and playing more minutes, but Ingles started 30 times en route to 14.7 points, 3.8 rebounds, and 5.8 assists in such games, all while playing a substantively different role than as a substitute, which definitely goosed his overall statistics and his award profile.

Ingles is unspectacular as a defender and can’t be relied on to consistently slow down opponents’ top perimeter options, but he is definitely capable where Snyder trusts him to take on that additional burden. He deserves credit for competent defense of premier wings if O’Neale is on the bench or positioned elsewhere. Like Clarkson, simply caring about and having awareness on that end of the floor goes a long way for Utah players who share the floor with Gobert, and Ingles is firm step above Clarkson in that regard. But defense isn’t exactly a calling card for any Sixth Man candidate, save for maybe Thaddeus Young in Chicago or Taj Gibson in New York, so it’s more of a “not positive” rather than a true demerit for Ingles’ candidacy.

And Ingles has his own version of backyard-dad cool. Conley’s reaction here tells it all:

And no Jazz win is complete without Ingles staredowns and clockwork three pointers:

A vote for Ingles for Sixth Man is a nod to maximizing efficient basketball, valuing players who enable lineup flexibility, and acknowledging the greatness and sacrifice of a player overqualified to be coming off the bench.

Who should win?

Both are obviously deserving. Per NBA.com, Clarkson and Ingles are 6th and 8th in the league in Net Rating, respectively, when exclusively measuring games played off the bench. So their measurable impact off the bench is similar; the choice between the two for fans and voters will probably come down to two factors: (1) how much it matters that Ingles started 30 games and (2) the belief in the non-quantifiable impact of Clarkson’s scoring.

For me, Ingles’ 30 starts is about 20 or 25 too many, especially since the difference in Ingles’ raw statistics between his bench and starter minutes is pretty wide. Fans’ preferences on these awards can validly come down to arbitrary guidelines—like games played for MVP, or true shooting percentage for All-NBA—and that’s okay! To that end, Ingles’ season went past the pinch-hitting capability expected of top substitutes and firmly into practical starter territory for my personal preference. The NBA’s defined eligibility for the award includes any player who started fewer than half of their games played—I personally think that figure should be lower, and am free to use that preference as a tiebreaker.

And Clarkson’s blunt force scoring machine presence feels more deserving of the Sixth Man of the Year award than Ingles’ well-rounded, hyper-efficient support role. Look, I am not dense to the importance of efficient shot creation. Efficiency absolutely matters when constructing rosters and lineups, assessing contract values, and crudely ranking players. (Ingles is a better player than Clarkson, to be clear.)

But the current perception that the modern Sixth Man should be a volume scorer is not merely because people like points (and especially points scored with an extremely cool vibe). There is an unquantifiable, almost mystical effect of a player who doesn’t receive the starting lineup announcement fanfare but checks into a game and sets the world on fire—efficiency be damned. This type of role and performance can be valuable for winning basketball when placed with the right situation and deployed in the right areas of the court. Bench gunning doesn’t have the same qualitative effect if the starters can’t score and/or the gunner in question is jacking up long twos with aplomb. I firmly believe the Ben Gordons, Jamal Crawfords, and Jordan Clarksons of the world can matter to winning basketball. I especially think it matters when these types of players exist on offenses that sit among the league’s best, which Utah is. I’d honor Clarkson, and Ingles gets my runner-up choice.

Utah fans are lucky to root for both Clarkson and Ingles. The Jazz will need them both at their best to win an elusive NBA Championship.

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