Salt City Seven: Film on the Finn, Plus Vibes, Boards & More

Markkanen has displayed pretty interesting scoring chops. (Trent Nelson, The Salt Lake Tribune)

Every Monday during the regular season here at SCH begins with the Salt City Seven, with a septet of recurring 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.

A quick dissection of a big-picture topic or burning question relevant to the week in Jazzland.

The Jazz are still hovering just above .500 even after a 4-9 stretch, and a few things are clear so far. The team plays a much more mature brand of winning basketball when Mike Conley Jr. is involved. Will Hardy is the real deal as an NBA coach. And something special is happening with regard to Lauri Markkanen.

Let’s zoom in on the Finnish forward this week. He has been the Jazz’s top threat, jumping to a career-best 22.2 scoring average on crazy efficiency for someone scoring that much. Aside from Markkanen, only recent MVPs Kevin Durant, Nikola Jokic and Steph Curry are averaging at least 22 points on .650 true shooting this season. Only eight players have maintained such figures for a full season: those three, plus Charles Barkley, Adrian Dantley, Kevin McHale, Reggie Miller and Amar’e Stoudemire. So Markkanen is in pretty special territory right now.

A lot of it comes down to just how locked in he is from three. He got off to a slow start (29.7% through his first dozen games as a Jazzman) but he has heated up to the point where his season figure is a blistering 41.3%, a career high.

He has been locked in off the catch, especially from angle left and that side’s corner. He doesn’t need much daylight to let fly off the catch, because at seven feet tall, it’s a ridiculously tough shot to contest. But he’s way more than just a shooter; even a lot of his outside looks come from really smart movement.

One of my favorite things he does is to reroute behind an off-ball pick when he sees the defense trying to cheat the screen. Both he and his teammates appear to have the freedom to short circuit the designed play when an opportunity like this develops.

That’s just good instinct, and that’s sort of the defining thread if you watch Markkanen’s 200-plus buckets this season. There’s just an understanding there, coupled with tools he’s collected along the way.

Take for instance the drop step. Coaches teach post players to plant their foot behind the defender’s foot when they turn to the basket on a post-up because doing so basically seals the defender behind and makes it considerably harder to challenge the shot without fouling. Markkanen has never been particularly prolific in the post, but he’s gotten enough reps there to both figure out the drop step and learn to apply it in other contexts. Like here:

Both times, Markkanen gets a smaller defender pinned, but what interests me the most here is watching his feet even before the catch is made. Even before the ball arrives, he uses the logic of the drop step to seal the defender behind. 

Sealing the defender on the spin move by using the “drop step” move even on cuts/seals.

It takes a level of mental sharpness to be thinking about how and where to move your feet even as you execute the catch. But when you’ve had 400-plus post-ups over the course of your NBA career, some of that begins to come more naturally. That’s what the Jazz are benefitting from now: the cumulative effect of six years of micro skill development that is combining now to deepen his advantage in situations like this.

Here’s a different (but similar example). On this play, Markkanen is fully behind the plane of the backboard on his corner-to-corner cut when he notices a defensive lapse. He knows he can get an easy bucket if he aborts the cut and instead makes himself available to a driving Kelly Olynyk. But again, watch his feet even before the catch. A lot of less heady (or instinctual, or both) scorers would worry about catching the pass first and then try to attack the rim. But that’s a tough angle to jump from, and a diagonal leap back into the defense would make that shot easier to block. So instead, Markkanen gets his feet out from under the backboard even as the pass is incoming. That’s a little thing, but not something every player would be smart enough to do.

He makes tons of great reads like that without the basketball. If he sees his defender inch away from him to show on the ball, he instantly makes himself a pressure release valve.

Those tendencies and that awareness are impressive, but every example we’ve looked at so far is Lauri learning to maximize off-ball scoring opportunities. That’s probably why Mark Russell Pereira keeps referring to Markkanen as a “dependent scorer” on his postgame hangouts. He’s mostly not the type to take over games as a Durant-style bucket getter. That’s OK.

In fairness to Markkanen, he does some stuff with the ball in his hands as well. He shoots 57.4% on attempts resulting from his 4.1 drives per game. That volume still aligns more closely to the job description of a second-side creator as opposed to some of the league’s alpha scorers, but it’s a start. In particular, he’s great at using his 7-foot frame to finish on drives, whether that means lengthening himself to stretch past the defender for a rim finish or getting to a short paint jumper that is nearly unblockable.

Even if he’s still more of a dependent scorer or second-side creator, there’s hardly anything wrong with being one of the very best of that ilk in terms of volume and efficiency. In some ways, it’s harder to scout or game plan for a guy who is a threat all the time, not just when the ball is in his hands. Klay Thompson has been an all-league superstar who generates a comparatively small portion of his own offense via sources like isolation play or P&R handling. The same is generally true for a lot of All-Star bigs who are the endpoint of possessions more often than they are creation engines themselves.

Either way, it’s fun to see Markkanen take another step as a scorer thanks to all these little techniques and tactics he has acquired along the way.

In the words of Jazz players/people

“The vibes are still high, we still feel super confident in the way we are playing.”

-Jarred Vanderbilt, via the team site

The Jazz have lost 9 of 13, barreling back toward .500 after a torrid start. But I’ve heard a lot of these types of answers during would could objectively be described as a protracted slump. Jazz coach Will Hardy echoed the sentiment that the Jazz have played some very good basketball even in their recent losses.

“For a good portion of the game, we played the way we want to play,” Hardy said after Monday’s loss to Chicago.

It makes sense, especially on offense. The Jazz now boast top-three efficiency on that end of the court, so it’s no surprise that guys are still feeling good about the offensive flow. And even on defense, they have the 5th best defensive shot profile in the league, and the fourth best even during this 4-9 dip (per Cleaning the Glass). Their opponents are actually converting well above expected eFG% rates based on location, which says that the Jazz are doing some things right but potentially just not impacting shooters as much as they need to.

Key stats that tell the story of the Jazz’s week

49.4%

Here’s another way the Jazz can lose despite running a great, modern offense and forcing inefficient shots on defense: their defensive rebounding rate is not awesome. They get 68.2% of reboundable opponent misses, the second lowest figure in the league. But in fourth quarters, that number drops even lower: 65.8% in the fourth for the season, and 58.2% during the 4-9 stretch. Over the past six games, it’s 49.4%, meaning that it’s more likely that an opponent’s miss comes back to them than that the Jazz grab it. That’s… not great.

282

Going into Monday’s games, the Jazz employ the NBA’s leader (Malik Beasley, with 64) and #4 guy (Markkanen, 61) in catch-and-shoot threes converted. As a team, they’ve made 282, second only to Boston’s 306. (The Celtics are an absolute machine right now.)

20 & 10

Jazz center Walker Kessler’s performance on Friday marked the only 20-and-10 performance by an NBA rookie off the bench this season. He was also the first Jazz rookie to pull 20-and-10 off the bench since the 1982-83 season — 18 years and change before the big man was born.

28.6%

Jordan Clarkson has hit a cold stretch, at 28.6% during the 4-9 funk the Jazz are in. Talen Horton-Tucker is 25.8% over the same span.

55%

Vanderbilt has made 11 of 20 shots from the right corner (55%), but is 1-for-6 (16.7%) on all other threes. He hit four of those right-corner treys on Saturday night — which is more than his total career 3-pointers made prior to this season (3).

Projecting the Jazz’s place in the bigger picture

At 14-12, the Jazz are currently tracking well outside the contender class but also too good to get a premium first-round pick.

It should be obvious by now that the front office’s goal was never to be *bad* even if they didn’t necessarily have the starpower to be great. Now that the schedule, injury woes and bad luck has tugged them back to just two games above .500 (with more tough ones coming), the guess here is that all options are open.

Frankly, being where they are in the standings probably makes it easier for them to entertain all kinds of moves: ones that would increase the projected wins this season, or ones that would improve future year’s title odds at the expense of this year’s 0.1-1.5% chance.

Recognizing the best (or most memorable) performances from each Jazz outing

According to Jazz tweeps, both of this week’s game balls were fairly easy calls.

Jazz 125, Clippers 112: Jordan Clarkson. When the Jazz surged in the third quarter to break a 5-game skid, there was an 11-minute stretch of that period in which all but one Jazz point were scored and/or assisted by one of Clarkson or Collin Sexton. Both were +19 for the game, and both had true shooting around 70%. Clarkson’s 33-4-5 was a little more eye-popping than Sexton’s 21-6-6. He was a near unanimous choice. Markkanen had 21 (on 11 shots), Vanderbilt (14 & 12) worked like crazy, and Olynyk did a little bit of everything.

Jazz 139, Pacers 111: Walker Kessler. The Ranger gets on the board! His 20-and-10 (11, actually) was historically unique for a Jazz rookie reserve, but even beyond that, he was really impactful defensively. It was one of the first times we really saw guys just blatantly driving away from him, and when they did take him on, the Pacers shot 40% at the rim with him around. Markkanen might have been the actual game MVP (24, 13 and 3), but Kessler was the story of the game by a wider margin, so he gets it. Another efficient night for Clarkson and Sexton, and nine assists for Horton-Tucker.

Strong in Defeat:

• Jazz 107, Bulls 114: Lauri Markkanen. Olynyk was about as good in the second half as Markkanen was early, but the latter’s 32-and-9 and seven threes were good enough that we probably don’t need to overthink this one.
• Jazz 111, Blazers 116: Jarred Vanderbilt. The Blazers decided not to guard Vando in the right corner and he torched them for four triples. We’ve owed him for a while because he keeps having very complete nights like this: 16 points, 7 boards, 4 assists, 2 steals. Clarkson scored a bunch (and took a beating) but didn’t have his most efficient night.

Looking ahead to the next seven nights of Jazz action

The Jazz’s extended stay in the Mountain Time Zone continues this week with two more games in Salt Lake and one just across the Rocky Mountains… but they will be tough ones.

Wednesday 12/7, Jazz vs. Warriors: After a worrisome start, the champs are winners of seven of their last nine. Curry averaged 33-7-6 through their first 15 games, but weirdly this recent surge coincided with the 2-time MVP actually settling down to “just” 27-8-6. That’s partially because other Dubs finally got going: Andrew Wiggins and Klay Thomspon are both averaging 21+ over this 7-2 spell, and they have made nearly half of their combined threes in that span. They rank 26th in location eFG% and second in actual eFG% which mean these dudes are just making shots.

Friday 12/9, Jazz vs. Wolves: Expect a lot of weird feelings as Rudy Gobert plays his first ever game in Vivint Arena as a visiting player. He comes in having as many single-digit scoring games in a month and a half as a Timberwolf (9) as he did all last season with the Jazz. He also just came off a — I can’t believe I’m typing this — 1-rebound performance in 26 minutes against Memphis. That said, Minny is suddenly looking at an extended absence for Karl-Anthony Towns, so maybe Gobert will be called upon for more of a role. They’re 1-4 since Thanksgiving, and they still don’t have a good rotation around their 5 core starters, who are a respectable +5.4 per 100 possessions together. 

Saturday 12/10, Jazz @ Nuggets: Jamal Murray is starting to look like himself again: 23-4-6 in his last five, on 50/44/80 shooting. That alone is enough to bolster optimism in Denver. The starting five has a +14.7 efficiency differential, and all groups with any five of those guys + Bruce Brown are a combined +12.1, per CTG. Their defense has been bad (they allow 70.7% at the rim, second worst), but that top-3 offense allows them to absorb some mistakes. This will be the third Jazz-Nuggets meeting, with the home team winning each game so far.

Random stuff from the Jazz community

If there’s one thing we know about the Utah Jazz, it’s that they hire highly GIF-able head coaches.

Will doesn’t like that call. pic.twitter.com/seQPrvKTV6

— Laird (@lairddoman) November 29, 2022

That wraps another Salt City Seven.