Salt City Seven: More Injuries, More Gobert-Mitchell Smoke, More Ls Cloud the Jazz’s Forecast

March 28th, 2022 | by Dan Clayton

Injuries, star tensions and an 0-4 skid made this a rough week in Jazzland (Trent Nelson, The Salt Lake Tribune)

Every Monday during the regular season, the 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.

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

Four straight losses at this point in the season are always going to feel crummy, under any circumstances.

But it’s honestly tough to know how concerned to be about this particular 4-game skid. The Jazz were without their second leading scorer and an important bench defender for all four games, and by the time the weekend rolled around, there were new injury concerns involving the frontcourt rotation, including to all-world defender Rudy Gobert.

Realistically, the path to victory in any of those four contests was pretty narrow and rocky, the margin for error pretty small. Once again, the Jazz are in a stretch where they just cannot seem to get guys healthy, and once again, the cost of all of that is showing up in the game-by-game results.

All season long, you’ve read in this column and plenty of other places how the Jazz are really quite good when they have their main players available: 27-11 when all five starters play, 13-5 when that quintet is joined by all of Jordan Clarkson, Rudy Gay, Hassan Whiteside and whichever of Joe Ingles/Danuel House has occupied the other main rotation spot at a given point in time.

But as more and more games pile up that DON’T meet that criteria, it raises the question of just how much these games mean from a macro quality standpoint. And, since the teams they’ve beaten while healthy didn’t necessarily have all of their best players available either, it’s also hard to know just how much solace to take in that 27-11 record. Truth be told, it’s just been a weird year to follow the NBA if you only trust data samples where both teams are fully healthy. That’s especially true for games among the contender class. 

So far, the Jazz have played 24 games against teams that are also in the league’s top 10, record-wise. Both teams’ optimal rotation pieces were in place for exactly zero of those 24 games. These games just haven’t been representative of what would happen if full-strength contenders saw each other in the postseason. So how much predictive value is there in any of these outcomes?

Honestly, it’s hard to know. The Jazz are currently a respectable 12-12 against those top-10 opponents. But they’re record against such teams in game where both team are at full health is — no exaggeration here — 0-0.

For example, here are the 12 wins.

Opponent health has been a factor in every Jazz win against an elite team.

You can see why folks are quick to affix the asterisk next to some of Utah’s biggest wins of the season. Every single time Utah has beaten a fellow top-10 team, someone has been out of the opponent’s lineup.

However, those absences don’t render all of these outcomes meaningless. The Ben Simmons-less version of the Sixers that the Jazz boatraced in December was technically down an All-Star, yes, but that’s also the version of the Sixers everybody saw until the eventual Simmons for James Harden swap. And pulling away to beat Phoenix by double-digits even without Chris Paul is impressive in light of how well the Suns have fared without the All-NBA guard. The Nuggets were without Murray during their entire top-10 season, so a sweep there is still an accomplishment, as is beating almost any version of Golden State without Rudy Gobert. Even that December win over Boston (without Jaylen Brown) looks more impressive now that they’re world-beaters.

Ultimately, Utah got six wins against the likely top four MVP candidates1, and won the only game against the league’s top team that they played with All-Stars Gobert and Donovan Mitchell. That has to mean… something. It’s hard to figure out exactly how much predictive insight we can glean from that list given opponent absences, but there are some good wins there.

Similarly, a lot of their losses have carried caveats, as well: the Jazz were fully healthy for almost none of their losses against elite opponents.

In a dozen losses to top-10 teams, Utah’s main guys were available just twice.

Even despite all those absences, they’ve been in most games. Last Monday’s clunker at Boston is the notable exception, and both Memphis and Dallas pulled away for double digit wins. But half of these games were decided by one or two possessions, despite missing bodies. Given who was missing in those games, that’s somewhat encouraging.

On the flip side, their rotation was intact when the Mavs earned a clutch win in early March, and when the Grizzlies stormed back in a quirky win in Salt Lake back in November. For their pair of close losses to Miami, they were missing only Gay. And Draymond Green’s absence on New Year’s Day certainly weighed heavier on the Warriors than Whiteside’s did on the Jazz.

Still, it’s funny to watch the more pessimistic fans do the mental gymnastics of disqualifying asterisked Jazz wins with ease, but viewing Jazz losses under similar conditions as alarming or even exposing. When the Jazz beat the Sixers without Simmons or the Bucks without Khris Middleton, some are quick to declare, “That doesn’t count, they weren’t whole!” Yet some of the same fans, when Utah gets whipped in Boston without Bojan Bogdanovic or falls without either All-Star in the Bay Area, have no qualms about jumping to conclusions about what those losses say. It’s hard to have it both ways.

The reality is that it’s hard to know what any of these outcomes say when put in the context of who played and who didn’t. It’s March 28 and we have literally zero data about how a full-strength Jazz team would fare against a full-strength top 10 foe. That’s bizarre.

Some games feel closer to “normal” affairs than others, but the reality is that we just don’t have enough information to know what would happen in a 7-game series with any of these teams if both squad were fully heathy. Here’s what we do know: the Jazz are losing games at a time they need to be winning games. This skid has come with a heavy cost to Utah’s playoff hopes, as they now find themselves fifth.

Keeping track of the Jazz’s place in the wild, wild West.

Let’s not sugarcoat things: Utah’s chances of starting the playoffs at home took a real hit this past week.

The teams around them all suffered multiple losses since last Monday, and yet the Jazz couldn’t capitalize, partially because of the injury issues discussed above. The loss to Dallas now means that they can’t open the postseason in Salt Lake City unless they outperform the Mavs over the final seven. That will be pretty tough since the Mavs have a much easier schedule and their main guys are all more or less healthy.

Just 14 days of NBA regular season action remain.

There’s a chance Dallas catches GSW for #3, which means that if Utah winds up 6th they can still theoretically stay opposite the bracket with both the Suns and the Warriors. But that means they’d have to win three road series to come out of the West. That’s a tall ask.

Utah’s schedule isn’t quite as tough as it looks, given that Memphis (like Phoenix) might be locked into its seed by then, the Warriors will be without Steph Curry, and the Lakers may be without LeBron James. But still, the chances of a late surge get slimmer with every loss — and with every new addition to the injury report.

A lot of interesting head-to-head action this week among the West’s (potential) playoff teams:

  • GSW-Utah will determine if the Jazz have any hope of catching the Dubs.
  • Denver-Minnesota on Friday is massive, too. The Wolves will have the tiebreaker either way (either via head-to-head record or by division record), so Denver needs this one to keep those more-than-pesky Wolves off their backs.
  • A round-robin of games between the top three teams wound up being pretty anticlimactic. Phoenix is locked into #1 and Memphis is close to ensuring #2, so Dubs-Grizz, Suns-Dubs and Suns-Grizz likely won’t be the dramatic salvo we imagined a month ago. That said, the outcomes of the former two really matter to Utah’s and Dallas’ pursuit of Golden State. 
  • Lakers-Pels on Friday could well decide who hosts the first play-in game. The Pelicans already own the tiebreaker, and given the six games L.A. still has to play against top-10 opponents, it’s unlikely the Lake Show can catch the Pels without grabbing this home win.
  • The Lakers also face all of the Mavs, Jazz and Nuggets, making them pretty relevant this week. Clippers-Jazz and Clippers-Pels both really matter to multiple teams, too.

In their own words

When Mitchell complimented “the guys who suited up tonight” after Sunday’s loss in Dallas, some took that as a veiled shot at the some or all of the five Jazz players who missed the game due to injury. I’m calling B.S. on that. I’ve heard similar phrases in hundreds of post-game interviews. It’s a cliché n the same vein as the “next man up” line, a plaudit to the guys who busted their butts in sub-optimal circumstances.

That said, an adjacent comment by Mitchell did capture my attention.

“To come up with a whole new game plan with like 40 minutes on the clock, it’s tough.”

-Mitchell, after Gobert was rule a late scratch in Dallas

The Jazz didn’t know Gobert would miss his 16th game of the season until just before the start of Mavs-Jazz. Mitchell commented on how the Jazz had spent the day preparing mentally within the framework of a Gobert-centric game plan, and then quickly had to improvise their whole rotation and schemes.

There’s enough smoke behind all the Mitchell-Gobert stuff that it’s fair to wonder: was Mitchell blaming the loss on the decision around whether his injured teammate should play? If so, that’s kind of concerning, for various reasons.

First, it’s sort of unfair *if* that was Mitchell’s goal here. The risk assessment decision about whether a guy should play involves a whole lot of parties, as Mitchell well knows. It’s not like Gobert simply didn’t want to play.

Also, did Mitchell expect Gobert to play injured just to save the rest of the team the mental energy of having to adjust schemes? If so, that seems unreasonable too. Teams adjust game plans all the time. Almost every timeout in the course of a game is for the coach to adjust strategies and make tactical changes. Granted, missing a player of Gobert’s caliber is a bigger adjustment than just calling a timeout to say, “OK, let’s try blitzing that pick-and-roll,” or “They’re guarding us this way, so the counter to that is X, Y, Z.” But still… shit happens. If Gobert and the staff were not fully confident in Gobert’s ability to safely play that game without risking further aggravation, then that’s something a team just has to adjust to. The same way they adjust to foul trouble, in-game injuries, opponent runs, officiating quirks, and whatever else can come up in the course of a game. The fact that they didn’t know Gobert would be out until 40 minutes before the game is a bummer. That doesn’t mean anybody was necessarily at fault.

Again, maybe Mitchell didn’t mean for any of that to come across as a criticism of Gobert. But just like Gobert needs to be perceptive enough to know how some will take it when he compliments Devin Booker’s defensive growth, Mitchell needs to know this type of statement can feel the fire.

Mitchell had his own injury on Sunday, too: he was helped to the bench after a wicked-looking ankle tweak, but checked back in minutes later. “I knew how significant tonight was and I wasn’t gonna allow it (the injury) to hold me back,” he explained. Again, that statement could be totally innocuous, or it could be a shot at guys who didn’t play through injury in an important matchup.

Quin Snyder defended his decision to let Mitchell play through it, saying, “He felt like it wasn’t that bad… Sometimes a coach has to trust a player, and sometimes the player’s gotta trust the coach.” Snyder did remove Mitchell around the six minute mark, “when we felt like the game was getting away from us.”

It’s unclear if the ankle issue will now linger into the Jazz’s remaining seven games. “We’ll just see how it feels tomorrow,” Mitchell said.

“Nobody’s going to feel sorry for us. We’ll bounce back and be ready to go.”

Stats that tell the story of the Jazz’s week.

99

Hat tip to the guys on the always really great Hardwood Knocks podcast for this one: Dan Favale pointed out that in each of the last three seasons, Royce O’Neale has passed the 2,000 minute mark AND cleared a defensive matchup difficulty rating of 99. Defensive matchup difficulty is just what it sounds like: it’s an empirical measurement of how many possessions (or partial possessions, in the case of a rotation or switch) you spend guarding the other team’s best player. O’Neale is just constantly taking the toughest matchups, almost regardless of position or skill set.

30th

You never like to be last in the NBA in anything, but the Jazz have that honor right now. Per Cleaning the Glass, they have the worst gap between their actual record and their expected record based on point differential. CTG’s math says they’re good enough per efficiency numbers to have won 51.9 games to date, and instead have won just 45. There are a few factors to blame here: their league-worst 1-6 record in games decided by three or fewer points, their seeming inability to come back in games, and of course the health stuff we talked about above. But it’s just one more indication that it’s been really hard to figure out how good this Jazz team even is.

-21

In a game that was tied with 90 seconds left, the Jazz were on the wrong end of two important stat categories in Charlotte: they lost 7-17 in points off turnovers and 7-18 in second chance points. That’s a 21-point disadvantage in a game that went to the wire. In other words, had Utah hustled more on the glass and/or been more cautious with live ball TOs, this one shouldn’t have ever been close.

114.9

So far this year, the Jazz’s own smallball lineups have just not been successful. The defense has been untenably bad when Gobert, Whiteside and Udoka Azubuike all sit. That shouldn’t be all that surprising given that the Jazz have played a specific way for several years in their center-anchored system, and a lot of those behaviors have to change on the fly for a smallball group to be successful. What’s weirder is that those centerless groups also can’t score: just 108.6 per 100 possessions heading into Sunday’s game in Dallas. That’s why it was notable that in that game, forced to play small for all 48 minutes, the Jazz managed an ORtg of 114.9. The defense still struggled (129.5), but that’s a bit of a positive for the group to start to figure out how to score without a traditional roller as the fulcrum of their offense. Relatedly, they did better at offensive rebounding on Sunday (23.5% of reboundable misses) than they have done all season without one of their three centers (just 18.1, per Cleaning the Glass).

-0.1

It sounds like the Jazz could be without Whiteside for some amount of time, which means recent 10-day signee Greg Monroe might actually need to play a role. Check the Twitter feed for a closer look about what Monroe may offer, but hey, his Net Rating for the season in 10 games with three different teams is essentially even: -0.1. The former lottery pick obviously has some skill, and at different points this season has helped Minnesota, Washington and Milwaukee at least tread water during absences by other key bigs.

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

Oh no, a week without a Game Ball! That’s never fun. Still, let’s hand out some consolation prizes to the top performers in Utah’s four straight losses.

Strong in defeat:

  • Jazz 106, Nets 114: Donovan Mitchell. A weirdly rough night for Gobert, an inefficient performance from Clarkson and another Bogey absence made this one fairly easy. The other viable candidate was Mike Conley Jr., who had an efficient 18 points, seven assists and two steals. But Mitchell’s 30-3-3 also came very efficienty, so there’s no need to overthink this one.
  • Jazz 97, Celtics 125: Donovan Mitchell. It’s not often you see a guy drop an efficient 37 points (.672 true shooting) and yet post a game-worst -24 net rating. That’s not entirely Mitchell’s fault; the Celtics had some really clever schemes and helps in place so that Mitchell couldn’t generate much for the rest of his team. He responded to that the correct way: by taking the challenge and running through the wall himself. It did make for some pretty uninspiring team basketball, but there’s absolutely no question about who the Jazz’s best player was in this blowout loss. Gobert was a distant second with 14 and 11.
  • Jazz 101, Hornets 107: Juancho Hernangomez. Mitchell had 26 and 7, but his case got complicated by a rough close. Gobert had 11 and 19 and held the Hornets to 31% as the primary defender, but his night was also less than perfect: he had trouble punishing switches and let a few defense rebounds get away. Clarkson was inefficient and had an oh-so-rough defensive night, and Conley’s outing didn’t quite qualify. So I decided to recognize the Spaniard’s night. When he scores 14 on 4-for-6 outside shooting, that’s just house money — even though the Jazz squandered his big breakout night with a bad defensive performance.
  • Jazz 100, Mavs 114: Rudy Gay. A Gay sighting this close to the playoffs is encouraging. Truth be told, he’s been playing better of late in many ways, but it finally translated into a nice box score: 18 points, 8 boards, 2 assists and a +7 in a game the Jazz lost by 14. Conley is my runner-up: he looked spry again and was even finishing in the paint on his way to a 14-point, 7-assist night.

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

The Jazz’s non-stop travel continues this week. Even their lone home game is really just a stop in a stretch of constant motion. This week they face three Pacific Division foes.

Tuesday 3/29, Jazz @ Clippers: Like the Jazz, the Clippers are reeling a bit right now: they’ve lost five straight. Paul George has started practicing ahead of a potential return, thought it’s unclear whether that will help them in time for this Jazz-Clippers matchup. Coach Tyronn Lue told reporters they’ll “see how he’s feeling,” per Ohm Youngmisuk. The Jazz have taken the first two from the Clippers by an average margin of 25 points, even though Mitchell, Bogdanovic and others missed their most recent drubbing of familiar playoff foils. A Clipper win technically keeps their hopes of No. 7 alive, but realistically, they are probably more focused on keeping the NOP-LAL-SAS trio behind them so they hang onto #8 and give themselves two chances to earn a playoff spot in the play-in tourney.

Thursday 3/31, Jazz vs. Lakers: James has been doing otherworldly stuff: he has had 36+ in his last four games, and his March has also included a pair of 50-point games. This might be the best month ever by a 37-year-old. He’s averaging over 30 for the season, an absolutely crazy accomplishment in his 19th NBA year. Unfortunately, he turned an ankle on Sunday and said after the game that it felt “horrible,” so we’ll have to see what his status is for Thursday. He also hasn’t had much help: the Lakers are 6-9 even in his highest scoring games of the season. Anthony Davis, meanwhile, has been upgraded from “out” to “doubtful” for Tuesday’s game, meaning there’s a chance he could play in that TNT-televised game on Thursday. The Lakers took the previous two, both by 2-possession margins after the Jazz led late but came apart down the stretch. AD missed one of those games altogether, and departed early from the other, with the knee strain that has kept him out since.

Saturday 4/2, Jazz @ Warriors: Just a positively brutal week for the Warriors: they finish a back-to-back in Memphis today, then host Phoenix and Utah next. They’re 1-5 since Curry’s injury (including the game he got hurt) and just have not been able to score without their MVP candidate. Utah’s still only three back in the loss column, though, and the tiebreaker is up for grabs, which makes this game potentially pretty huge. If the Jazz back to their winning ways *and* get some help from Memphis and Phoenix, they could theoretically head into San Francisco with a chance to pull even. But that’s a lot of ifs. GSW’s offensive rating over this 1-5 malaise is just 110.0, 7th worst over that span.

Random stuff from the Jazz community.

There’s obviously not a lot of cheery vibes in Jazz Nation right now, which means the interwebs aren’t exactly teeming with fun Jazz stories. So let’s end the week by hearing Jay Bilas talk about the impressive basketball wisdom of his former Duke teammate, Snyder.

 

Just two weeks remain! Let’s see if the Jazz can get things right.

Comments are closed.

© 2024 Salt City Hoops. All Rights Reserved.