Salt City Seven: Conley’s Calming Presence, Starter Shooting Woes & More

Conley’s effect on Mitchell and the Jazz has once again been a positive early on. (Melissa Majchrzak via espn.com)

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.

We’ll use this space all season to quickly dissect a big question or storyline from the Jazz’s week. The 1-1 start provided plenty of questions to ponder, as the Jazz polished off a projected playoff team in their season opener and then looked rather flat as they dropped a home game to Minnesota.

But there were a few common themes across both games: the starters (outside of Rudy Gobert) struggling to find their shot, some rim finishing issues, and the Jazz finding extra points off the offensive glass.

Another trend that was true in both the big win and the disappointing loss is something we’ll be keeping our eye on as the Jazz shift more facilitation duties to their rising superstar Donovan Mitchell. So far, the team has performed better on offense and on the scoreboard when Mitchell has had playmaking help.

It’s way too early to draw any conclusions, but once again, the Mike Conley effect has been palpable. Utah’s offense has been seven full points better (per 100 possessions) when Mitchell is joined by Conley than when the former plays without the latter. Seven points. When the two have played together, the Jazz have outscored opponents by 15 points in 38 minutes; in the 30 minutes we’ve seen Mitchell operate without Conley, the Jazz are minus-9¹.

Again, the sample sizes here are way too small to treat any of these as anything more than interesting data points. But it’s consistent with last year’s trend, too. The Jazz were +3.3 Net Rating last season when Conley and Mitchell were together, and +3.7 with Mitchell and Joe Ingles, who may not look like a point guard but functionally is another facilitator. On the other hand, Utah was -6.6 when Mitchell played without either of those two.

The Jazz need roughly the same things from Mitchell whether he’s running with a second facilitator or not. They want the ball in his hands a lot, and that’s the right thing for both Mitchell and the Jazz, now and in the long term. But it’s a lot to ask a player to orchestrate the offense AND be the endpoint of it on 30% or more of those possessions. At least right now, it could be coming with an efficiency cost, as Mitchell has opened the season with .458 true shooting. The sample size is small enough (12-for-39 overall, 6-for-19 on threes) that he should be able to bend the percentages back the right way with a hot game or two. So this is not about outcomes. It’s a question of whether Mitchell can produce quality shots for himself and others when he’s tasked with moving the gears of the Utah’s offensive machinery himself AND finishing a large number of the possessions himself.

That’s why it can be helpful to have other guards who can take turns initiating the offense and making that first set of reads. Similar stars to Mitchell have had that. James Harden has played with Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook and now John Wall. Dwyane Wade had it with guards like Jason Williams and Mario Chalmers. Allen Iverson and Aaron McKie and Eric Snow. As with those superstar guards, the ball will probably end up with Mitchell on a ton of those plays no matter who starts the possession. It just helps to have someone else share the responsibility of getting the offense humming. 

Frankly, there are other things afoot here, too. Some of Mitchell’s teammates are struggling to hit shots right now, which puts more pressure on him to try to force his impact on the game. Plus, the Jazz are focusing on earlier offense, which is changing the shot diet to some degree. But it’s worth keeping an eye on this trend, especially as we get more sample behind it. Mitchell is still a hell of an offensive creator, so this is just about finding what makes the team perform better overall.

Plus, Conley is really good. The Jazz got him specifically to help steady the offense and leverage his decade-plus of experience dissecting NBA defenses. In both games so far, the Jazz have played winning basketball, shot more efficiently, defended better, and shared the ball more when Mitchell and Conley have played together than when Mitchell didn’t have his veteran sidekick. Heck, even Mitchell’s own shooting has been far better in both games when Conley was out there with him.

Mitchell is tracking to superstardom either way. None of this should read as a critique of his abilities to facilitate or carry the offense. It’s just about putting him in a position to succeed, and so far the best way to do that has been to give him another floor general to work with.

In their own words.

“The games where we don’t have the legs, we’ve got to have the mind. We’ve got to be tough mentally.”

-Gobert, to the Deseret News’ Sarah Todd

Nobody should really be talking about heavy legs in the second game of the season, but Gobert’s broader point here is a good one: great teams are better able to fight through their flat nights and play smarter to come up with ways to win. That doesn’t mean there’s anything disqualifying about Utah’s lackluster home opener. Purported title contenders like the Clippers, Bucks and Nets all suffered embarrassing losses on Sunday. Everybody stumbles, and especially quirky things often happen in the first few nights of the season.

But the point is that Utah can get better at finding a path to victory even when things aren’t going their way. They almost did that against Minnesota, pulling to within a single-possession margin late, but came up short.

“We would much rather come out with a W and not have to learn our lessons this way, in this fashion,” Conley said in the same DNews article. “But we’ve got to understand that teams are going to come out and give us their best shot night in and night out… You have to come with a better sense of urgency from the tip.”

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

It’s way too early to talk seriously about the playoff race, but since we reserve this space to analyze the Jazz’s place in the Western Conference power structure, we’ll use the popular FiveThirtyEight forecast to check in. 

The model there still views the Lakers and Clippers in their own tier atop the conference², followed by a 5-team scrum that includes the Mavs, Rockets, Suns, Nuggets and Jazz. At least as of right now, the Blazers and Pelicans are just behind that group. Several other projection systems foresee a similar outcome, although a few forecasters — including the Vegas oddsmakers — instead have Portland replacing Houston in the West’s top 7. It’s hard to know how long Houston’s current group will be together, or what exactly they’ll get in return should they move on from the disgruntled James Harden. But that’s roughly the group.

So if you’re looking for a rooting guide of sorts as you keep track of the other 29 teams’ games, the teams whose losses might be of greatest help to the Jazz come next spring are the Mavs, Suns, Nuggets and at least one of the Blazers and Rockets.

Howe are those teams looking so far?

• The Mavs started 0-2 against the Lakers and Suns, but then they completely obliterated a shorthanded Clippers squad on Sunday. They also have yet to play at home.
• The Suns eked out a win against Dallas, and then split a pair of games in Sacramento. The Jazz get a chance to measure themselves against the reworked Phoenix squad this week.
• The Nuggets look a bit vulnerable early, getting shocked by Sacramento at the buzzer and then letting the Clippers pull away to drop them to 0-2.
• The Blazers looked overwhelmed against the Jazz on Wednesday, then rode CJ McCollum’s career night to get past Harden’s Rockets.
• The Rockets had their first game postponed, and were missing half their rotation in the one game they played (a down-to-the-wire loss against Portland), so it’s hard to get a read on them. We also have no idea how long Harden will be around.

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

32.1%

With a nod to my SCH colleague (and current houseguest) Ken Clayton for initially tweeting this, that’s the cumulative shooting percentage of the four non-Gobert starters after two games. They didn’t even shoot well in the win (34%), but on Saturday they looked even worse (30.4%). Royce O’Neale and Bojan Bogdanovic have had particularly frigid starts, at 22% and 27% respectively, but Mitchell isn’t too much better at 31%. True shooting for those three has been pretty rough: 28%, 38% and 46%, respectively. Oof.

Luckily for them, the rest of the rotation has been shooting pretty well outside those three. Both bigs have been on fire (75-plus true shooting for both Gobert and Favors), while Joe Ingles and Jordan Clarkson have started really well (60-plus) and Conley has been solid (57.9%).

57%

The Jazz also have been far less efficient than usual at converting close shots, with just 57% at the rim³. League average is right around 65%, so that’s a pretty problematic number, and again, it mostly comes down to the starting guards and wings. Conley, Mitchell, O’Neale and Bogey are a combined 9-for-28 (32%) at close range. That’s fluky and won’t continue at that level, but if you’re looking for reasons behind these early shooting woes, these close finishes are a big part of it. If the Jazz had converted even just an average percentage at the rim on Saturday, they’d have found eight extra points, enough to flip the outcome even if literally nothing else about the game changed.

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that those close misses by ball handlers often put the bigs in a position for easy putbacks. The Jazz currently lead the NBA in offensive rebounding percentage, which is an interesting reversal for a team that had previously made a conscious choice to prioritize transition defense over hunting for O-boards. Last year’s team ranked 17th for the full season, and the two previous years’ squads ranked 10th and 20th.  

28

There was a lot to like about Utah’s defensive performance in Portland, including that they really dictated what shots the Blazers could take — and which Blazers, at that. The Blazers took a whopping 28 midrange shots (about 38% of their total attempts) and made just 25% of them. The Jazz tried some different things to get the ball out of Damian Lillard’s hands, and they really imposed the shot distribution.

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

Looking ahead to the next seven nights of Jazz action.

The Jazz already get their first 4-games-in-7-nights stretch of the season, starting tonight.

Monday 12/28, Jazz @ Thunder: I was all ready to fire off my jokes about the Utah Jazz facing the Oklahoma City Future Draft Considerations, but then they opened the season with a last-second win in Charlotte. Still, it’s no secret that their roster was cobbled together more as an accidental byproduct of asset-generating deals than by any particular basketball strategy. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (24 points, 9 assists in Charlotte) will be more centrally featured on this rebuilding squad, but veterans like Jazz alumnus George Hill and former All-Star Al Horford give them some air of legitimacy.

Thursday 12/31, Jazz vs. Suns: Neither Chris Paul nor Devin Booker have been shooting particularly well during Phoenix’ 2-1 start, but the veteran superstar certainly looks comfortable setting the table for the new-look Suns. Old Jazz fan favorite Jae Crowder also makes a return to the Viv, although he too has had some early-season shooting woes: just 23.5% from three so far.

Friday 1/1, Jazz vs. Clippers: The Jazz start the new year  with their first back-to-back. They’ll host the Clippers, who are fresh off the most embarrassing loss of the young NBA season so far. Without Kawhi Leonard, the Clips fell behind by 50 in the first half, an NBA record for a deficit before intermission. Expect a bettter showing than that to ring in 2021, especially if Leonard is back by then. Their first two games saw them hold off the Lakers and Nuggets, their peers in the West’s top three a season ago.

Sunday 1/3, Jazz @ Spurs: The Spurs lost on Sunday after a 2-0 start, perhaps a bit surprising since they project as a lottery team in most forecasting models. The key to their nice start is that they’re defending well, but some of that might be good shot luck on the defensive end. Their expected opponent eFG% based on shot location is 55.2%, and they’re outperforming that by more than four percentage points (50.9%). So we’ll see how much that defense holds up as they get exposed to more quality teams, but for now they’re doing really well at limiting corner threes — a big part of the Jazz’s offense.

Random stuff from the Jazz community.

when you get exactly what you asked for on Christmas morning 😛

Have a safe and merry Christmas, everybody! pic.twitter.com/72UqaNEeFA

— utahjazz (@utahjazz) December 25, 2020

Here’s hoping you got everything you wanted this holiday season, including safety, health and happiness. With any luck, the new year will be “a damn sight better than the old one” and we can start to restore some normalcy in our sports experiences and in life in general.

Thanks for following along with Salt City Hoops throughout 2020.

Two down, 70 to go. Come back next Monday for another seven sections breaking down another seven days in Jazzland.