Salt City Seven: The Collins Question, Road Ahead, Streaking Sexton & More

January 22nd, 2024 | by Dan Clayton

John Collins and the Jazz starting group found itself behind early in two straight games. (Francisco Kjolseth, 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. (Last week’s entry came late, so this issue will cover action from Wednesday through Sunday..)

A quick look at the big, burning question of the moment in Jazzland

After two straight losses — and more to the point, two big early deficits — have put the starting lineup back under the fan base’s microscope.

The Jazz’s current starting group is 9-3 and has a season-long net rating of +5.8 per 100 possessions, per Cleaning the Glass, so it’s not like it’s broken. But in both games since our last Salt City Seven, the Jazz faced teams with big, skilled centers and just came out of the gate clunky on both ends. They trailed by 19 against Chet Holmgren’s OKC Thunder, and by 17 against Alperen Sengun and the Rockets. They eventually erased both deficits, which in a way makes the poor starts that much more alarming.

Fair or not, a lot of the discussion has revolved around John Collins. The 6-foot-9 big man makes the Jazz really small, skilled and interesting when he plays as the de facto five, but his defensive limitations make him better as a four. The Jazz have tried to paper over that positional question by having Lauri Markkanen play in the the middle of the 2-3 zone or by bringing loads of help to posting bigs. It has worked well enough to propel the Jazz back to .500, but as we saw this week, it’s just not going to yield the best chance at a win against certain bigs.

When Collins plays as the team’s lone center (i.e. no Walker Kessler, Kelly Olynyk or Omer Yurtseven), the Jazz are +0.2 per 100 outside of garbage time and heaves. That lines up with their middling record.

What’s odd is that when he plays alongside the centers, it actually goes the other way: -17.6 when he plays next to Kessler, -12.5 with Olynyk. A lot of those Collins-Kessler minutes came either when Markkanen was out injured or in the early part of the season when they played in a starting lineup with spacing-challenged Talen Horton-Tucker, who has since been excised from the rotation altogether. Maybe at some point the Jazz need to give Collins and Kessler some run together with some more productive guards before they scrap the pairing altogether. In the meantime, the broader point is that Utah’s halfway into its season and it’s still not entirely clear where Collins’ best fit is.

On an individual level, he’s doing a lot right. His 3-point shooting (36.3%) is right back at career levels after an off year due to a finger injury. So are his rebound percentages, and his per-minute scoring is close to career norms.

So why are most his high-minute lineups unsuccessful on the whole? Some of it is noise and/or the messy science of who’s on the court with him and when. But a lot of it comes down to the defensive end. He’s allowing 64.4% shooting at the rim, which is to say that opponents shoot roughly what they would shoot with any random NBA person defending the paint. Overall, when he’s the primary defender on a shot attempt, guys shoot 3.7% higher than expected. That’s not the worst of the Jazz rotation guys (sorry, Keyonte George), but it illustrates the conundrum.

Collins is still just 26, and he has never really existed inside of a coherent defensive ecosystem, so there’s still a chance he could figure some things out.

But let’s keep an eye on that +5.8 efficiency differential from the starting group, especially as the Jazz see a more diverse array of bigs on their schedule. Just as importantly, let’s keep track of Collins’ impact on the Jazz’s most foundational piece; right now, Markkanen is -2.2 in lineups featuring Collins and +11.3 in all other lineups. That gap has to start to close for Collins to be considered a key piece in what the Jazz are building around the Finnisher.

 

Telling or interesting words from Jazz people

“When you go on the road… it’s the team versus everybody else. That’s when we need to be at our best as a team… Our camaraderie has got to be there. You gotta have that energy each and every day because it’s not going to be easy.”

-Kris Dunn on the Jazz’s 6-game trip

The Jazz’s longest road trip of the year is officially underway, with Saturday’s stop in Houston marking the first in a series of six road games. In all, they will have logged more than 5,300 flight miles on their current trip by the time they touch down in Salt Lake City early on the 31st, and the only reason it’s not more is because they get to play the Knicks and Nets in the same city without boarding their seventh flight in a week’s time.

After this, the Jazz will have just two 3-game trips remaining on their schedule, along with two 2-game trips and three solitary trips out for a single game.

 

Stats that tell the story of the week

16.8%

The real cost of Utah’s turnover problem — which reared its head this week with three straight high-TO games — is that it makes the other team’s job on easier at the other end. Jazz opponents start their possession with a transition opportunity 16.8% of the time, good for second worst in the league.

29.7

Before this week, Collin Sexton had gone for 28 or more points just once as a Jazzman. This week, he did it three straight times (30, 31, 28). If he had gotten one more bucket in Houston, it would have been the first time in his career he had three straight 30-point games, but alas, he missed his final five shots.

7/0

Dunn’s seven assists in Houston made it his fourth game of the season with at least five assists and no turnovers. No Jazz player has more such games this season (Kelly Olynyk has three). The Jazz offense is 9.2 points better per 100 non-garbage time, non-heave possessions when Dunn is on the court, which is in the 95th percentile for all players. The only player who impacts the offense more positively is Markkanen (+13.1, 99th percentile).

14-10

The Jazz are 14-10 in games where Olynyk has at least 4 assists, which is even more remarkable when you consider that they were severely shorthanded in many of his highest assist outings. They’re 8-12 when he has three or fewer (or when he sits).

 

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

Because we stole Monday’s win for the last edition of the Salt City Seven, we only have consolation prizes to give out for the two losses.

Strong in defeat:

  • Jazz 129, Thunder 134: Walker Kessler. Had I not already rewarded Sexton with Monday’s game ball, I’d probably have given him this. A second straight 30-plus game, plus seven assists on some really smart reads. Markkanen’s 26 and 10 made him another solid candidate, and both Collins (21) and Clarkson (18) did a bunch of scoring. But the Jazz were a different team with Kesser on the floor. The D-rating was 107.8 with Kessler as the center of the defense, and an unconscionable 143.6 when he sat. The net rating went from +24.2 to -36.4, a huge spread. Kessler had 7, 11 and 3, but that doesn’t begin to describe his impact.
  • Jazz 126, Rockets 127: Jordan Clarkson. Both JC (33-12-4) and Sexton (28-3-5) missed shots down the stretch they’d love to have back, but they were the keys in this game. Houston was determined not to let Markkanen (22 on 18 shots) have his typical impact, so the Jazz had to scrap their usual stuff and let the two dynamic guards go to work as defense breakers. Clarkson had 12 points (and 6 boards!) in the fourth, while Sexton added 10. Their cases are super close, so we’ll let the arithmetic decide. Kris Dunn also has a sneaky case here: +17 in his first double-digit game since before Christmas, to go with 8 boards and 7 assists. A lot of the biggest defensive plays in the game involved Dunn.

 

Breaking down the Xs and Os behind a Jazz score.

The Jazz ran this same action twice to weaponize Houston’s hyper-aggressive, switching defense on Markkanen against them.

Both times, Markkanen recognizes the switch is coming, so he turns to the inside of the defender to seal the inside position. On the first one, the angle is weird for Dunn, so the Jazz use a hi-lo pass to get him the ball by way of Collins. The second play is the same exact tactic, but since the play is coming from the side of the floor anyway, all Markkanen has to do is buy Sexton a couple seconds to clear the other defender off that side. (Which, Sexton hilariously does by just pushing the bigger Jabari Smith Jr. out of the way.)

Because of plays like this, Markkanen’s next dunk will be his 50th on the season.

 

Looking ahead to the next seven nights of action

Here’s a couple of sentences about each of Utah’s games this week as they continue a 6-game road trip.

  • Tuesday 1/23: Jazz @ Pelicans. The Pels are 13-7 since getting healthy, surging up to 5th in the West since a so-so start. They allow the second most threes and the third most corner threes, which is helpful if the Jazz are having a good shooting night — which they didn’t in their December 28 loss, making just 30.8% from deep.
  • Thursday 1/25: Jazz @ Wizards. It’s a 1-10 slide for Washington, who will host the Jazz on the second half of a back-to-back. They’re the league’s worst rebounding team, which helps make sense of their trade for Marvin Bagley Jr., but they’re still winless in his three games as a Wizard.
  • Saturday, 1/27: Jazz @ Hornets. I had a whole thing written about how they had just won two of 20 games… and then as I was putting the finishing touches on this week’s edition, they shocked the Wolves without Gordon Hayward, Cody Martin and both their young bigs, despite Karl Towns’ 62. 

 

Random stuff from the Jazz community

I think this is what the kids these days call “adorbs.”

Check out the sequel post from this little Clarkson fan’s dad, too.

More Jazz basketball ahead. See you next week!

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