Salt City Seven: Questions at the Quarter Mark, Conley Effect & More

Conley and the Jazz had a 1-3 week. (Joe Murphy 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

“How bad do we want to be a good team?”

-Quin Snyder to his team at halftime of a blowout loss in Toronto, as relayed to the Salt Lake Tribune by Mike Conley

The Jazz were in the locker room of Scotiabank Arena, down 40 to the Raptors in the fourth stop of a 5-game road trip. The Jazz had just played their worst half in Snyder’s tenure, maybe in modern Jazz history. The defense was porous and confused, allowing the Raptors to dissect them with sharp passing on the way to 77 first-half points. The offense was similarly uninspired, wheezing to a 28% shooting half, including at 1-of-18 stretch in the second quarter. 

In other words, they were in pretty bad shape during that halftime conversation.

But Snyder’s approach in that locker room address, Conley tells us, wasn’t about yelling and screaming. Instead he asked them a series of questions about how committed they wanted to be to all the things that go into winning basketball.

The speech obviously worked. Utah outscored its host 42-18 over the first 9:30 of the second half. Even if the run was merely symbolic, a gesture of effort in a game already too far out of reach, the message was received.

The approach seems right, so we’ll follow Snyder’s lead today. Shouting about the Jazz’s 1-3 week is probably an overreaction. After all, they are 12-8, three games ahead of last year’s 20-game record, after playing the toughest schedule by far of any Western contender¹. For all the hand-wringing about recent losses, the Jazz are two games out of sole possession of a homecourt spot.

So no shouting here, either. But Snyder was right to position his halftime speech in the form of a series of questions. Becase here at the quarter-mark of the season, there are a lot of still unanswered questions about this team. Here are a few of them.

1. Are the main guys trusting each other enough? The Jazz arguably have the best collection of individual talent since their ’90s Finals teams split up. Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell are capable of playing like superstars, they’re joined by borderline stars in Bojan Bogdanovic and Conley, and Joe Ingles and Royce O’Neale are solidly start-quality. And yet their offense has been mired in the bottom third of the league all season. It could be because their still developing chemistry and a collective trust, as NBA tracking stats show that the ball is moving at the lowest rate of the Snyder era. The offense has become a super-simplified version that often features a single pass or screening action, followed by a shot. Can this offense be greater than the sum of its parts if they play more often as a unit, instead of the my turn-your turn offense that has defined certain stretches?

2. Can their main guys get going at the same time? Conley had a rough 4-game start, then averaged 18-4-4 over the next 11 games, then slumped again with 23% shooting over the next four before breaking out with a 20-point performance in Toronto. Ingles has reached double figures in just six of his 20 games, and is shooting career lows from the field and from three. Mitchell’s true shooting has slipped to .504 since mid November after an impressively efficient start. Can Utah get all of their core guys firing on all cylinders together?

3. Does the rotation need tweaking? After the six players named above, it gets dicier for the 2019-20 Jazz. Frankly put, the rotation has been a problem, and Snyder has experimented with staggering different starters into the second unit to try to stabilize groups that have bled points on the scoreboard. But lineups with two or fewer from that core group continue to struggle. Snyder has a tough call to make: does he stagger his starters more liberaly across the second unit, even if that means fewer minutes for his best players to play together? Or does he prioritize the strength of that core group and continue to sweat those bench stretches?

4. Are the right players playing? This is a correlary of the point above, but there are certainly arguments to be made that the rotational tweaks could involve something more sweeping than who enters and exits the game when. Jeff Green and Ed Davis have long histories as rotational pieces, but even they have only played well in stretches. And after those two, there is certainly room for debate. The offense has been anemic with Emmanuel Mudiay at the helm for a month now, and Georges Niang has a team-worst -11 Net Rating. Meanwhile, Dante Exum appears to be making a case for more minute as he works his way back from knee rehab, but even his advanced numbers look wobbly since he’s really only been used in three- to five-minute stretches, and mostly out of position on the wing.

5. Can they stabilize their road defense? Remember all that “defense travels” talk? So far, that hasn’t been the case. The Jazz are 8-1 at home and 4-7 away from Utah, but the offense has only seen minor slippage. On the other end, Utah’s defense gets nearly seven points worse per 100 possessions (107.3, up from 100.8) when the club travels. The home dominance has been nice, but elite teams need to be able to win at a higher clip on the road. Some of that has been the early opponent road quality, but Utah also has a couple of blights on its road record, like losses in Sacramento and Memphis.

At its core, Utah has the bones of a very good team. They have more starpower at the top than they’ve had for a long time, and a top-five NBA coach is pulling the strings. But with a quarter of the NBA season in the books, those are the questions and issues that seem to stand between them and the elite tier. 

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

75-9

Basketball Reference’s data on 3-point shots goes back to the 1983-84 season. Since that year, teams knocking down 21 or more shots from downtown are 75-9 all-time. So how did Utah lose in Milwaukee despite converting a franchise-record 21 triples? Easy: it’s because they ONLY shot from outside. The Jazz took just 15% of their shots at the rim, one of the lowest figures in the NBA this entire season per Cleaning the Glass. Milwaukee defends differently than almost anybody in the league, emphasizing paint protection even if that means leaving the perimeter relatively unattended. The result is that they’ve led the league at limiting rim attempts both years under coach Mike Budenholzer. Without Gobert in the lineup, Utah simply didn’t have the tools to break that interior defense.

(And by the way, all of those nine losses came from the last three NBA seasons, and all but two of them happened this calendar year. That means that the first 31 times — and 48 of the first 50 times — an NBA team sank 21 or more threes, they won.)

31.4%

So far this season, Mitchell is 18-for-57 (31.6%) on 3-point attempts when the Jazz are trailing or tied, compared to 29-of-67 (43.3%) when Utah leads. The sample size is small enough to allow for some noise there, but that’s a pretty wide gap. Mitchell could shoot exactly his season average on his next 100 shots in each situation, and the percentages would still be 4.4 percentage points apart (40.1% and 35.7%). 

19.8

When Conley is on the court with Gobert so far this season, Gobert averages 19.8 points per 100 team possessions, and the team has an ORtg of 110.5 and a net of +8, per NBA.com’s Impact tool. With Conley off, Gobert scores 11.8 points per 100, with an ORtg of 91.6 and a net of -7.7. Gobert’s usage drops from 16.3% with Conley all the way to 11.0% without him — the Jazz simply can’t get him the ball when Conley is off.

We’ll talk more about Conley in the next section, but the key to understanding his contributions goes beyond checking box scores. His presence makes the Jazz’s stars better, most notably Gobert. Bogdanovic’s ORtg drops from 112.7 to 93.8 without Mike, with a 14.5-point swing in Net Rating. Mitchell’s Net Rating take a 17.8-point dive without Mike, with an offense going from 113.2 to 96.7. 

Simply put, Conley makes the best Jazz players better. 

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

Conley effect

I get it: box score stats make it look like Conley has struggled a ton in roughly half of his first 20 Jazz games. And in a sense, he has — he can play a lot better than this.

But even on nights when the box score might lead you to believe Conley is not helping the team… he is. 

Here, for example, is a play you’re just not running for Ricky Rubio, Ben Simmons or Russ Westbrook. 

Here’s a perfect play to illustrate Conley’s value. He fakes an off ball screen and then turns 90 degrees to go into one of those curl PnRs at the top that the Jazz like to run. But even though Brogdon is late because of the X/O wrinkle, he still has to go over the pick. pic.twitter.com/E4b9aVhEaf

— dan clayton (@danclayt0n) November 28, 2019

The X-and-O wrinkle on display is a little decoy fake screen that gets Malcolm Brogdon behind the play, but because Conley is a threat, Brogdon still has to go over the screen, set at an impossibly high level. So Brogdon winds up way behind the play, and Conley and Gobert essentially get to play 2-on-1.

Two plays where the attention given to Conley opens up his teammates (click to enlarge)

That play is not an outlier. Conley is constantly trapped at the elbow or in the floater zone when he comes off pick-and-rolls, and that pressure opens up stuff all over the court. The image to the right shows two separate plays where he gets trapped because teams think of him as a floater/pull-up threat, which either emptied the left side of the floor (left image) or pulled players up from the baseline for Gobert (right).

This was a 2-for-8 game for Conley. You might look at the box score after such an outing and say, “Conley didn’t help the Jazz tonight.” That’s why you have to look beyond counting stats. Conley’s gravity made a real difference all night (and if you don’t believe me, check out this thread of tweets), and while his shots didn’t fall, they were good shots within the offense. 

The Conley effect is real, and this is with him still struggling relative to his recent norms. Imagine when he’s more comfortably and fully deployed within the Jazz offense.

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

The Jazz are 1-3 since we last doled out some imaginary mantle-candy, which means we only have one Spalding to hand out to get current. And luckily for the Game Ball department, this one was relatively easy work.

Jazz 103, Grizzlies 94: Bojan Bogdanovic. Bogey had 10 of the Jazz’s points in the 24-4 surge the visitors used to flip the script at the start of the second half, but he was hardly done there. He’d pour in another 16 in a close fourth quarter. He hit a back-breaking three with 1:42 left to extend Utah’s lead to six, and on the subsequent play he handled the ball and set up Royce O’Neale from deep to put the nail in the coffin. All told, it was 33 points (on 20 shots), eight rebounds, a pair of assists and a game-high +18. Also considered: Gobert dominated the defensive end during Utah’s big run and notched a 13-13 double-double.

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

Last week we talked about Dallas crashing the Western Conference’s top five. Since then, their road wins in Phoenix and L.A. (Lakers) have vaulted them past LeBron’s squad and into a fourth-place tie with the Jazz in FiveThirtyEight’s projections. They now have road wins in places like Houston, Denver, and L.A., part of a 7-2 road record. The West’s big five might officially be a big six, as a half dozen teams are clustered within 5 wins of one another in the forecasting site’s projeciton.

Meanwhile, the Lakers still rank atop the standings, but 538 projects them to finish last among that group. Why? Mostly because they have played a mostly-soft schedule (more on that in the next section). You can only play the opponents in front of you, but the truth is that so far, the Lakers don’t have that many truly impressive wins. They’re probably real at 17-3, but other Western Conference teams will be keeping eye on how they perform when the schedule gets stiffer.

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

The Jazz have one more stop to complete their current 5-game trip, and then they’ll get to sleep in their own beds for more than a week. They’ll play thrice before our next SC7, including a showdown with a new Western Conference contender on Wednesday.

Monday 12/2, Jazz @ Sixers: When these two teams faced off in Salt Lake City, Ben Simmons missed most of the night due to a shoulder injury. The Jazz still had their hands full with Joel Embiid (27 points, 16 boards), but Gobert was able to hold him to 5-of-16 shooting. Still expect the game to have a different dynamic with a healthy Simmons. Philly’s starting win and third-leading scorer Josh Richardson missed Saturday’s game, and is listed as day-to-day ahead of Jazz-Sixers. Richardson had 24 in Salt Lake City last month.

Wednesday 12/4, Jazz vs. Lakers: The Jazz were missing Bogey when they faced the new-look Lake Show early on, making this the first full-strength² battle between two burgeoning contenders and two of the league’s top defenses. It’s a good test for the Jazz, but also for LeBron James and crew, who have benefitted from the easiest opponent slate of any Western Conference team by far. At 17-3 they’re obviously a quality team, but they have mostly been feasting against lottery-bound clubs. Their only road win against a likely playoff team came in Dallas, and they scored home wins against Miami and Utah (without Bogdanovic). We may get a better sense for how good the ’19-20 Lakers are now that their schedule is about to turn: they play eight of their next nine on the road, starting with Denver and Utah on a back-to-back at elevation, and then solid Eastern teams like Miami, Indiana and Milwaukee.

Saturday 12/7, Jazz vs. Grizzlies: Just like last season, the Jazz are getting a big early helping of the Grizzlies. This will be their third matchup with Conley’s old team, after splitting two games on Beale Street. This one might have a significantly different feel to it, though; in addition to playing in the Jazz’s gym, where Utah is 8-1, the Grizzlies might be without their rookie sensation. Ja Morant is listed as “week-to-week” with back spasms. That would leave Jaren Jackson Jr. (15.1 ppg) as the leading scorer in the Grizz lineup.

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

A little LOL from last week’s win in Memphis.

😂😂😂

— Joe Ingles (@Joeingles7) November 30, 2019

There’s another week in Jazzland. Come on back next Monday for more!