Salt City Seven: 4 Ls, 3 Chances for Redemption, 2 All-Stars & More

February 4th, 2020 | by Dan Clayton

For the first time since 2000, the Jazz will have two players on the court for All-Star Sunday. (Melissa Majchrzak via espn.com)

Every week here at SCH begins with the Salt City Seven: seven regular features that let us relive the biggest moments, key performances and hot issues in Jazzland from various angles. Check in every week for the quotes, stats, plays and performances that tell the stories from the last 168 hours in the world of the Jazz.

An important quote from Jazz players or personnel from the week

“The biggest thing for us is: where do we go from here? It can go one of two ways: you can let it keep happening or do something about it. At the beginning of the year we let it drag on, and you guys know how that was. We’re way more far ahead (now) as far as that goes, so I think we’ll be in good shape.”

-Jazz All-Star Donovan Mitchell on the team’s recent struggles

Mitchell gave this quote to the Salt Lake Tribune’s Eric Walden right smack in the middle of his team’s current 0-4 slide. Utah had just lost consecutive games to Houston and San Antonio, and then would go on to lose in Denver and in Portland over the latter half of the week.

So the fact that the Jazz’s funk continued past this quote tells you which of the “two ways” it went: Utah had a rough week.

But it wasn’t any one issue that led to the Jazz’s first 4-game skid of the season. Mitchell’s quote above came while addressing defensive lapses specifically, and defensive issues did pop up throughout their losing streak. But the reality is that the Jazz found diverse ways to lose games this past week.

Here’s a bonus “By the Numbers” section devoted to showing just how different each of Utah’s four losses were. 

  • 28%: Normally, the Jazz get 35% of their total shot attempts as open or wide open threes, and they convert just over 40% of them. Against the Rockets, they got a remarkable 46% of their shots as open and wide open threes — but converted just 28% of them. That’s the ball game. Eric Gordon’s 50-point game notwithstanding, the defensive effort was actually fine when they kept Houston in halfcourt — 94.7 points per 100 non-transition possessions, a roughly average night, per Cleaning the Glass. But with so many misses — and with a late third-quarter stretch where they turned over the basketball five times in a 3-minute span — there were too many runouts for Houston.
  • 71%: The offense was far better against San Antonio. The defense was far worse. The Spurs were just walking into uncontested midrange jumpers. Per CTG, the Spurs’ 71% from midrange was the best performance in any game by a team this season. They were also in the 99th percentile for accuracy at the rim, but they didn’t get there that often. After all, they didn’t need to. Overall, Utah allowed more points per halfcourt possession than 93% of all defensive performances this season.
  • 27-1: In Denver, the Jazz were doing just fine on both ends until suddenly they surrendered a 27-1 run to the Nuggets. During that stretch which featured mostly bench players, Utah went 0-for-12 from the field with two turnovers. Included in those offensive struggles: Mitchell himself didn’t score until 44 minutes into the game.
  • +13, +15, +13: Against Portland, defense was definitely the issue again; overall, it was Utah’s worst defensive night of the season. But specifically, most of the damage was done in three separate spurts: Blazer runs of 13-0 in the first quarter, 15-0 in the second quarter and 13-0 again in the third. Those runs were relatively compact, lasting just 2:30, 2:30 and 2:27, respectively (from first Blazers score to last Blazers score). If you spot an NBA team 41 points in under 7.5 minutes, it’s damn near impossible to win no matter what you do in the other 40.5 minutes. Add in another 19-7 Blazers run in the fourth, and Utah was hopelessly out of reach.

Unfortunately for Mitchell and his team, it wasn’t any one issue. The defense had bad stretches, but the offense was at least equally the culprit against Houston and Denver. The bench unit continued to wobble, but it was mostly starters who gave up runs of 15-0 and 19-7 to the Blazers, and who failed to make the Spurs’ midrange shooters the least bit uncomfortable.

Bottom line: there’s no one thing the Jazz need to address to bounce back from this season-worst losing streak.

Stats that tell the story of the week or highlight a timely topic

41-24

That’s the score in the week’s four losses just in the minutes when Mitchell checks out to get his second rest of the second half. Because of the team’s bench problems, they have Mitchell playing three separate stints per half so that he can be on the court to help steady the second unit. But that odd sub pattern keeps Mitchell off the floor for important fourth quarter stretches when the opponent has already gone back to its closers. Mitchell didn’t make it back on the court in those four games until the 6:22, 4:29, 6:19 and 5:07 marks in those fourth quarters. 

That’s far too late for Utah to be without their main offensive threat. The Jazz staff does this so that Mitchell can chaperone a shaky band of reserves, but what makes this harder to swallow is that they were minus-22 this week in all minutes where Mitchell shared the court with at least two players outside Utah’s main six. In other words, staggering Mitchell in with the second unit is not even accomplishing the desired result of enabling winning basketball in those minutes, AND it’s sapping strength from the core and keeping Mitchell off the court for crucial fourth-quarter minutes.

Think about that: minus-17 while buying Mitchell that fourth-quarter rest, and minus-22 when he’s playing with the bench. That’s a minus-39 (or -9.8 per game) hole. There has to be a better way to allocate Mitchell’s impact across the 48 minutes.

29%

Joe Ingles is in a bit of a shooting funk, at 29% from three over his last eight games. But winter shooting slumps have become something of an annual tradition for the Jazz forward. In the 2015-16 season, Ingles shot 28% from deep in January and February combined. In ’16-17, he shot 31% for 17 games in January and early February. In ’17-18, he slumped to 28% from mid December to mid January, and last season he had a 12-game stretch of 27% shooting in January. 

20+

For all that has been said about Mike Conley’s struggles — and let’s be clear, he has had multiple slumps this season — he reached 20 or more points for the sixth time of the season on Saturday night. Only the two All-Stars and Bojan Bogdanovic have had more 20+ games for the Jazz this season, and considering that Conley has only been healthy and not on a minutes limitation for 22 games, that’s more reliable than a lot of fans and pundits have given him credit for.

Breaking down the Xs and Os behind a Jazz score from the week

Rub screens for easy buckets

The Jazz are clearly making an effort to be more opportunistic about early scoring opportunities of late, and that includes by running semi-scripted actions even in transition. One of those actions that the Jazz use a lot to generate opportunities on the break is the “rub screen.”

A rub screen is, in a sense, not a screen at all. A player zigs diagonally in front of the ball handler, and the ball handler zags behind in the opposite direction. The screener never really stops moving, but if he and the ball handler can time their routes correctly, the ball handler can still use the rub screen to get downhill.

Watch Conley use rub screens to get to his preferred hand and headed to the basket.

On both of these plays, the switches on the rub, but it doesn’t matter because Conley throws a wicked change of speed at the defender right as he clears his teammate’s airspace. The defender is still mentally navigating the switch, and Conley is in fourth gear, tearing down the left side with his preferred hand.

Here’s a twist on the transition rub screen:

Rudy Gobert sets the rub screen for Mitchell while Ingles back-picks his guy. Essentially, this is the Jazz running Spain pick-and-roll with the rub, which is really clever. It completely discombobulates the defense; two guys follow Mitchell, a smaller Jerami Grant winds up on Gobert, and Ingles winds up completely open. The easy pass here would be the pass out of the soft trap back up to Joe, and Mitchell actually fakes that pass to lift Bogdanovic’s defender. Then he throws a laser of a cross-court pass to Bogey, who reads Denver’s “oh crap” reaction really well and zips the ball back inside.

Really smart decisions by Mitchell and Bogey make this play work the way it does —  but the advantage was created by the Jazz calling for set action early in the shot clock.

After each Jazz win, Twitter helps us decide who was that game’s MVP or most memorable performer

For the first time all season, the Game Ball committee got the week off. A winless seven days means there’s no leather to allocate this week.

Instead, let’s use this space this week to check in on the season Game Ball standings.

  • Gobert 12
  • Mitchell 7
  • Bogdanovic 6
  • Ingles 4
  • Conley 2
  • Jordan Clarkson 1

Tracking the wild Western Conference postseason race and the Jazz’s place in it

Utah’s slide has cost them in the projection systems — but not as much as you might think.

Basketball Reference projects the Jazz’s finish at 51 wins, clustered with four teams between third and sixth. FiveThirtyEight has them at 52, all along in fifth place. And ESPN’s BPI-driven model still puts them in third place with 53.

The bad news, though, comes from B-Ref, where teams odds are broken down by each specific seed. According to their model, the Jazz now have a better-than-even chance (58%) of being an underseed. 

Don’t fret too much though; all of these models react to recent play, so if the Jazz can right the ship this week, they can start to direct their percentages in the other direction. Speaking of which…

A quick look at the Jazz’s next seven nights of action

After coming up empty on a 4-games-in-6-nights stretch, the Jazz get a little respite now, with three days off. But then they will finish on quite the sprint before the All-Star break, with five games in their final eight evenings of work.

Three of those happen before our next SC7 edition, and the theme of the week in those three matchups is redemption: all three come against teams that dealt them losses in their current 4-game skid.

Wednesday 2/5, Jazz vs. Nuggets: The Jazz played Denver very well on both ends until things fell apart late on Thursday. So they have to be thinking they can even the season series if they have a bit more discipline for all 48 minutes. But Jamal Murray is finally back in action after missing 10 straight games with an ankle tweak, so this one could have a very different feel to last week’s matchup.

**Thursday 2/6: NBA Trade Deadline: Of course, a lot of attention will be paid to what happens in between Utah’s home games this week: the NBA’s last chance for teams to make intersquad deals. Expect a relatively quiet deadline for the Jazz, though, for a couple of reasons. First, they already made a splashy trade during this season, acquiring Clarkson just before Christmas. Second, they are light on positive assets that are tradable. For more on trade possibilities and Utah’s asset situation, check out this Q&A by our Ken Clayton.

Friday 2/7, Jazz vs. Blazers: Portland has lost three of four on the road, but the lone win was an impressive one: an 8-point victory over the Lakers. The Jazz are going to have their hands full (again) with Damian Lillard, who dropped 51 on them in Oregon last week, but whose torrid stretch was finally halted by his off night in a blowout loss to Denver.

Sunday 2/9, Jazz @ Rockets: Expect a very different game from last week’s home loss to Houston. That one had a weird emotional energy, coming just a day after the NBA world had been rocked with the news of Kobe Bryant’s passing. It also featured a career night for Eric Gordon, since lead guards James Harden and Russell Westbrook both missed the game. If those two play in Texas, expect a game that has a completely different dynamic — which certainly isn’t to say it will be easier. Also, will Clint Capela still be a Rocket on Sunday evening?

Because after all, following a basketball team is supposed to be fun

Both Gobert and Mitchell have been playing at an All-Star level for a while now, but somehow they have taken significant leaps this season. Mitchell is posting a career-high year in points, rebounds, assists, all three shooting categories, and most all-in advanced metrics. Gobert is displaying his usual dominance, but has improved as a finisher and as Utah’s clutch weapon on both ends of the court.

Both are undeniably deserving, and give the Jazz their first real dual All-Star experience since the turn of the century, when both John Stockton and Karl Malone played in the 2000 All-Star game. (They also technically had two All-Stars in 2007, but Mehmet Okur was named as a replacement selection for injured Jazz forward Carlos Boozer, so only the former actually played in the game.)

Congratulations to Utah’s two new All-Stars!

That’s it for this week. Stick around SCH as the Jazz try to get things right this week — and we’ll be keeping an eye on the trade deadline, too.

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