Salt City Seven: Best So Far, Historic Week, Sap Facts & More

Which Jazz forward has been the best 2024-25 performer? (Rick Egan, The Salt Lake Tribune)

Every week during the regular season begins here at SCH with the Salt City Seven, 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 exploration of a big-picture topic

We’re roughly a fourth of the way into the 2024-25 season, and for the first time in the Will Hardy era, there’s probably a decent debate to be had at the quarter mark about who has been the Jazz’s top performer so far.

The word choice there is deliberate. Highest-performing player doesn’t always mean the same thing as best player, or most valuable player, or most interesting building block, or whatever. For most teams, the “best player” label doesn’t move around like a traveling trophy, and if it does that team is probably either fortunate enough to have multiple superstars… or they’re in some amount of identity trouble.

Lauri Markkanen remains Utah’s best player, and that will probably be true for the foreseeable future. He’s the guy at the top of the opponent’s scouting report and he’s the guy who’s most difficult to solve for.

Your faithful SC7 scribe had a recent conversation that veered into whether Jazz fans should be about Markkanen’s dips in scoring and shooting in his third season with the club. To be honest, I was kind of surprised by the premise of the question. After all, his raw scoring, per-36 scoring and true shooting percentage are all better than his pre-Jazz norms. He’s playing slightly fewer minutes and getting off slightly fewer attempts than in his first two seasons in Utah, but his efficiency is still over .600 TS%, and there are some clear contextual factors that explain all of this.

For one, Markkanen is back to playing without a table-setting guard whose purpose in life is to facilitate. He’s played half a season with such a player in his career, and that was the year he won Most Improved Player in a runaway and got his first All-Star nod. Because Markkanen is still a somewhat dependent scorer, a facilitating guard was always going to be the catalyst to bring out the best version of him. The Mike Conley Jr.-Markkanen combo was a winning tandem in 2022-23 (+3.1 per 100) but only lasted half a season together before Conley was dealt. Last year, Markkanen’s best player pair by net rating was when he played with Kelly Olynyk (+6.5), not a guard but a willing ball mover.

(In fairness, Darius Garland averaged 8.6 assists in his season with Markkanen, but he’s not quite the innate table-setter Conley is, and also those two shared the court with three non-shooting starters.)

Playing without that ingredient has clearly cost Markkanen some efficiency, which was to be expected. The other (related) factor taking a toll on the Finn’s efficiency is that, with no true facilitator, the Jazz are clearly inviting him to do more self-creation. There are a lot of ways that has been pretty evident, including in the tracked play type stats at NBA.com

Source: NBA.com

Play type tracking is pretty flawed, but the directional insight here is pretty interesting. In Lauri’s first Jazz season — also his lone All-Star season — he was doing significantly more scoring in situations where the ball was given to him basically in time for him to use the possession: rolling, spotting up, cutting and popping off of screens. That’s still a large part of how he scores, but the proportion has shifted and he’s now 1.36 times more likely to score in a situation where he’s really got the ball in his hands: iso, P&R handler (including DHOs) and post-ups.

It could be great for Markkanen’s long-term growth to spend this season (when the Jazz aren’t super trying to win anyway) operating at the edge of his comfort zone and trying more things. If that causes a scoring dip from the mid-20s to the high teens in the short term, it’s worth it if the end result is a more complete scorer.

But all of that has opened the door for someone like John Collins to make the case of being the Jazz’s best performer today.

Collins is having probably the best season of his career. He had slightly better raw stats over a 2-season peak in Atlanta (20 & 10 versus present-day 18 & 8) but it’s kind of looking easy for him in fewer minutes and on fewer shots than his best Hawk years. He’s far more efficient with his much-ballyhooed 50-40-90 shooting, including red hot outside shooting that’s important since Utah is back to experimenting with 3-big lineups.

The only other player who really belongs in the “best performance thus far” conversation is Collin Sexton. He’s averaging about a point less than Collins, and his shooting splits aren’t that far from Collins’ vaunted level, either: 48-43-90, which is rather impressive for a guard who takes two thirds of his shots inside the arc. Walker Kessler is once again having a tremendous impact, including with a league-best 9.6% defensive possessions ending in blocks and 54% rim defense. His role is too limited on offense for him to be in the mix as the season MVP, but his bounceback is super meaningful after a bumpy second season.

A lot of box score-based all-in metrics put Kessler and Collins above Markkanen in the Jazz’s pecking order. EPM (I think correctly) still values Markkanen’s overall impact on how the Jazz play.

All four have been solid. This writer is still willing to buy any Markkanen stock being sold by those impatient with the experimentation. But for the first time since he burst onto the scene in 2022, there’s at least some fun discussion to be had about who’s done the most over the Jazz’s first 23 games.

Telling or interesting words from Jazz people

“I was definitely a lot more comfortable on the floor (before the injury). That’s really why I was so excited to play my second year, just because I knew what to expect and I was so much more comfortable.”

–Second-year forward Taylor Hendricks

Hendricks gave his first interview since a season-ending ankle and leg injury. Interestingly, he said that after a doctor snapped his dislocated ankle back into place, he thought it would be a relatively short-term injury.

Now, he knows that the Jazz and his doctors have already ruled out a return during 2024-25, so he’s focusing on day-by-day rehab. He’ll start traveling with the team again in early 2025, which he looks forward to since it will make him feel more connected to the team and, after all, “Those guys make me laugh a lot.”

He mentioned a lot of supportive words from his teammates, and from Hardy.

“He’s really not worried about how I’ll recover,” the youngster said of his coach. “He knows my work ethic so he knows that I’ll be right back, and he’s not worried at all.”

Stats that tell the story of the week

-32

The Jazz took 32 fewer shots than the Thunder on Tuesday night, the product of a historically bad turnover performance. That is the largest deficit in field goal attempts in the last three seasons, which actually makes sense since Utah’s 19 first-half turnovers were tied for the most in any half by any NBA team since — and this is true — the New Jersey Nets in November 2007, in a game that featured Penny Hardaway and Shaq. Jordan Clarkson was in junior high school at the time, and Cody Williams was about to turn three.

39

The win in Portland brought a ton of superlative references, including being the second biggest road margin ever (behind a 49-point victory in Sacramento in 2021) and the first time in club history nine players have had double-digit scoring in a game. But also, the 39 fast break points scored by the Jazz were the most in franchise history since 2000. It was also tied for the most this NBA season, and the Jazz happened to be involved in both of those games; Milwaukee sprinted to precisely 39 points against them in early November.

1994

The Jazz became the first team in almost exactly 30 years — since December  29-30, 1994 — to have consecutive games with a win and a loss by 40 points or more. In fact, no team in that span has had consecutive games decided by 40+ at all, but it’s even wilder that the Jazz (and the Heat 30 years ago) split those games. The closest anybody else has come to that was in 2021-22, when the Bulls had a 46-point win and a 42-point loss separated by just one game. Last year’s Pacers and Lakers had 40-point games that were five and 10 days apart, respectively, and both of them lost the first and won the latter.

6

Only six NBA games this year have come by a 40-point margin, and the Jazz have been involved in three of them (a win and two losses).

Dissecting a Jazz scoring play from the week

Obviously we had to include a play from Utah’s 141-point outburst in Portland. The problem is that a ton of the scoring plays from that game were mostly the result of either the Jazz just running the ball right up the gut of the defense, or of the Blazers just being incredibly lazy. Sometimes both.

The Portland defense wasn’t great here either, but it’s at least partially because of some good clipboard work to disguise the real intention of some early action:

This is set up like the same early staggered screen the Jazz used a dozen other times in that game. And it’s fairly common for the Jazz to slip screens, or “ghost” them altogether. But in this case, the second screen by Juzang is a pure mirage. He never has any intention of holding that position until Isaiah Collier gets to him. In fact, you can actually see Collier wait to use the first screen until Johnny Juzang is already slipping out into a flare cut.

The Blazers were dropping the bigs way back for more of the game, and Drew Eubanks’ guy is so far back here that at first you see Juzang’s guy look around like, “Wait, do I need to stay here to help on the ball?” When he finally realizes he’s been duped, he just points feebly at the shooter, who has no defender within 10 feet of him as he goes up into his shooting motion.

As I’ve said before, the Jazz probably fake/ghost more screens than they actually set, especially when the guards and wings are the screeners.

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

Jazz 141, Blazers 99: Walker Kessler. There were plenty of strong performances to choose from, but Kessler was a team-best +35 because when he was on the floor the Blazers just couldn’t score. He was the primary defender on 30 shots, per NBA tracking, a pretty wild number — and Portland shot 33% on those attempts. He had a pretty uncommon 13-and-17 double-double with five blocks, and he rebounded one of every five Jazz misses while on the floor. Max scorer Collins (20) was also really good, Keyonte George had a solid 17-5-4, and we should certainly give Svi Mykhailiuk props for a 13-8-4 performance after being a surprise insertion into the starting lineup.

Strong in defeat:

• Jazz 106, Thunder 133: Walker Kessler. This wasn’t any Jazz player’s finest night, but Kessler did play well while the game was still competitive, and finished with a double-double (17 and 11) on very efficient 6-for-7 shooting, and anchored a pretty decent halfcourt defense in the first half. Anybody else we might consider here (like Sexton with 17-3-4 or Collins with 15 on 9 shots) was a little too complicit in the turnover problem. Johnny Juzang had a nice nice off the bench.
• Jazz 97, Kings 141: Keyonte George. George had 25-5-6, and also ripped four steals in a remarkably efficient night. He, Collins, Sexton and then George again all took turns as the hot hands, but the Jazz had too many guys not hitting, including Markkanen.

Looking ahead to the next seven nights of action

It’ s a light week in the NBA, as things slow down to accommodate the In-Season Tournament knockout round. That results in just a single Jazz game in the next seven nights:

• Friday, December 13: Jazz vs. Suns. Phoenix is barely above .500 after another 3-game skid, and is now 4-10 over the last month as health issues set in. The whole issue is Kevin Durant: the Suns are 11-2 when he plays, 1-9 when he doesn’t (the only win coming in Utah). If he doesn’t play, expect a bigger role for 25-pgg scorer Devin Booker, who is posting hi lowest shooting percentages from the field and arc since before his four All-Star selections. Former Jazz wings Royce O’Neale and Grayson Allen both average double figures for Phoenix, and longtime Utah assistant coach Vince Legarza is now on Mike Budenholzer’s staff.

Random stuff from the Jazz community

Right after 2005 second-rounder CJ Miles visited the Jazz, a second-round pick from the very next draft announced his retirement from basketball. Congratulations to 2006 #47 pick pick Paul Millsap on a splendid career that included seven Jazz seasons, four All-Star selections, an all-defense nod, and more than 16,000 points scored in the regular season and across his 130 career playoff games.

More Paul Millsap facts:

• In the 30-team era, only two players selected in the second round (Danny Green, Draymond Green) have appeared in more playoff games than Paul, and nobody selected as late as his 47th spot.
• He, Andrei Kirilenko and Karl Malone are the only Jazz players on the franchise top 10 for rebounds, blocks and steals.
• No player selected by Utah past the first round scored more Jazz points than Paul’s 6,713.
• He’s eighth in Jazz history in Win Shares, 12th in Value Over Replacement Player.
• I once shot craps with him in Wendover during his restricted free agency summer.

In terms of all-time Jazz players, I don’t think Millsap can be any lower than about 25th. Even if you put all 16 Jazz All-Stars ahead of him (and I’d put Conley, Truck Robinson and maybe even Markkanen slightly behind for now for longevity reasons), there are really only 6-7 others who you could really even argue belong above him. Jeff Hornacek, because duh. Joe Ingles, the franchise leader in threes and a culture-setter for eight seasons. And maybe some combination of Darrell Griffith, Thurl Bailey, Greg Ostertag, Bryon Russell and Derrick Favors because they each played 9-10 seasons in Utah and are all over franchise leaderboards.

Personally, I have Millsap at 19 or 20 on my franchise top 50 list, which actually exists because I’m that much of a dweeb.

Enjoy this weird little mid-season break!