Salt City Seven: Mitchell’s Next Level, Attacking Denver, Final Season Stats & More

Mitchell has the combination of early playoff chops and early playoff setbacks to propel him to a big third postseason. (Melissa Majchrzak via espn.com)

Every week during the regular season 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. Since the 2019-20 season extended into this past week, we have one more SC7 to complete our chronicling of the year, as well as look ahead ot the playoffs.

An important quote from Jazz players or personnel from the week

“Whoever they put on me, (I have to) just try to find a way to get into the paint and make plays. Whether it’s scoring, passing, whatever it is. Being able to initiate the offense in that way is my biggest thing… Just making the right reads and then going from there…  

“To be honest with you, I think the biggest thing for me is just being able to lead… and go out there and just be mentally locked in and kind of know what to expect before it happens.”

-All-Star Jazz guard Donovan Mitchell, on what he expects in his third postseason

There is a chance we’re about to see something special from Donovan Mitchell. 

We won’t know until this odd playoff season gets underway, but the opportunity is there for the third-year pro to take another step in his evolution as his Jazz face the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference playoffs. Already a historically precocious playoff scorer for a player this early in his career, Mitchell is poised to redefine his trajectory, especially as he leads a team that is going to need him to be every bit as good as the league’s top stars if they’re to have a chance at a deep playoff run.

We’ve known for a while that Utah would be without second leading scorer Bojan Bogdanovic for the postseason. We just learned they’ll also be missing secondary creator Mike Conley when the playoffs open. In order to survive those absences against the No. 3 seeded Nuggets, Utah will need a lot from its offensive star, who has already established himself as postseason scoring machine — and who also has already been dealt the type of playoff setbacks that can inspire a certain type of star to push back against adversity.

It would be hard to overestimate just how remarkable Mitchell’s playoff debut was in 2018. He led an underseed to a 6-game upset of a team led by two All-Stars, and along the way averaged more points (24.4) than any rookie in the playoffs since 1987 (Chuck Person). In fact, his scoring average was the highest by a rookie to advance past round one since, no joke, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar¹ in the 1970 playoffs.

After crashing the Western Conference semifinals in 2018, though, Mitchell found himself at the top of a very good team’s scouting report in last year’s postseason.

“Last year at Houston, they did a good job of — I kind of did a poor job, I should say, of getting into the paint and making plays,” Mitchell admitted in an interview on Saturday. “I just tried to get to the rim.”

Emphasis on the “tried.” Mitchell made just 17 of 45 shots in the restricted area in that series, just 37.8%. His outside shot was off, too (11-for-43, or 25.6% from three), leading him to an abysmal 37.1% effective field goal percentage. His assist percentage cratered, too, from 21.2% in the regular season to 15.5% in five games against Houston. He had his blinders on, and the outcomes weren’t good.

But now, Mitchell finds himself in a unique position, both having tasted playoff success and having learned from playoff failure so early in his career. Many of this era’s top players — LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, and others — didn’t even reach the postseason until their third season in the league (or later, in Curry’s case). He has a level of playoff savvy at this point in his career that those superstars had no opportunity to develop.

“Having two years under my belt, I know I don’t have the most experience on the team,” Mitchell added, “but it’s a good amount.”

Two years of playoff experience, it turns out, is pretty valuable. That’s about when most of this era’s Finals MVP-level superstars turned a corner. LeBron’s playoff scoring average jumped from 25.1 to 28.2 in his third postseason (which didn’t come until his fifth pro season). Curry went from 23 points per game to 28.3 in his third playoffs. Durant was already in that range as a scorer (28.6 ppg in his second postseason, 28.5 in his third), but he massively upgraded his efficiency in the third postseason, and took OKC to its first ever Finals appearance.

Kawhi Leonard took a meaningful mini-leap within his third postseason, after averaging 8.6 and 13.5 in his first two postseasons as a Spurs role player, and then 13.3 through the 2014 Western Conference Finals. San Antonio needed more from him to beat Miami in the Finals during his third year, and he averaged 17.8 (including 23.7 in the final three games) as he secured his first Finals MVP. The next year he jumped into the 20s, and eventually to 30.5 playoff points per game last year for his second championship.

In other words, all of the players who led their teams to titles in the last eight seasons had big jumps as go-to playoff scorers in their respective third postseasons.

For Mitchell to make a similar leap, he’ll have to draw on what made his 2018 performance so spectacular, while also being instructed by the pitfalls that caused him to struggle in 2019 against the Rockets. He’ll also have to break through against a Nuggets team that has made things difficult on him during the regular season.

In three games against Denver this year, Mitchell has put up a true shooting figure of .388, his worst performance against any opponent. And before his outburst over the final 10:07 of the Jazz’s most recent loss to Denver, it was even worse than that; Mitchell had made just 16 of 56 shots (28.6%) against the Nuggets before a 20-point outburst that spanned the final seven seconds of regulation and both overtimes last weekend. There are a number of reasons for that, but the primary one is Torrey Craig, a big-bodied defensive specialist who has been assigned to harass Mitchell. (“He’s a hell of a defender,” the All-Star recently said of Craig.)

That’s what stands in Mitchell’s way. With no Bogey, no Conley and a tough opponent featuring a defender who wields Spida-specific kryptonite, it would be totally understandable if Mitchell scuttled through another inefficient postseason.

But if he has a megastar leap in him like the title-caliber studs listed above, history says the third postseason might be when we start to see him crack the playoff code. And it would be perfect timing for the Jazz if that leap came now. 

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

No need for charts, graphs, spreadsheets or odds; it’s Denver.

So instead of breaking down the playoff race, here is a special stat section focused on the Denver-Utah matchup. All of the stats in this section exclude garbage time and heaves, and come from stats site Cleaning the Glass.

• Denver ranks 23rd in “location eFG%,” which measures expected field goal percentage based on shot location. Yet they rank 9th in actual eFG%. No team in the league has a bigger positive difference between those two ranks, which frankly just means Denver is good at nailing attempts that we nerds would view as low-efficiency shots. In particular, they’re the third best team in the league from “long midrange,” and take the ninth most shots from there. The implication for Utah is that they’ll need to contest everything, rather than resting on a good defensive shot profile and shrugging when the shots go in.
• Utah finished the season as the best 3-point shooting team and eight best at creating those shots. That’s a problem for Denver, who was average at defending those shots (15th) and below average at limiting them (21st).
• Denver is also below average at limiting rim attempts (18th) and defending them (22nd). Utah has the fifth best accuracy at the rim on offense.
• The Nuggets are the fifth best offense in the league, but they’re not as good in the halfcourt as one would think. They rank 14th in points per possession in a halfcourt setting, but then they give that number a nice boost by scoring 22.8 points per 100 reboundable misses on their end of the court. That’s the second best figure in the NBA, and something I talk about at length here.
• Denver is pretty bad at generating transition points (25th in points added to their ORtg through transition play) and a little above average at defending transition (10th in opponent points added through transition). Utah is pretty bad at both (24th on offense, 26th on defense). Utah does a little better at slowing teams down after a miss, while Denver is pretty elite (2nd) at limiting transition opportunities off of a turnover.
• The two teams are actually very close in point differential, which historically is a better predictor of future success than raw record. Utah is 2.5 points better than opponents per 100 possessions, while Denver is +2.1. However, Denver is #1 in the league in terms of outperforming their expected win total based on differential. What that generally means is that Denver comes out ahead in close contests more often than you’d expect.

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

Since we devoted the last section to stats that preview Jazz-Nuggets, let’s check in on some final season stats here.

24.0

Mitchell ended the season literally one point off of a true 24.0 scoring average, but he doesn’t have too far to round up from 23.9855 for us to be able to call him one of the 13 players in the league this year to average 24 or more. This career-high output leaves his three-year average at 22.7. Among active players, only James (26.5), Durant (25.3), Joel Embiid (24.3) and Carmelo Anthony (22.8) had a higher scoring average in their first three years — although Luka Doncic and Trae Young are both on pace after their respective second seasons. All told, his average in his first three seasons is the 14th highest of any player to debut in the 3-point era and play three seasons. Damn.

.699

Rudy Gobert ended the year at .699 True Shooting. It marks the third time in four years that Gobert has led the league in this important stat that measures scoring efficiency per shooting possession, and the one year he missed the top spot (2017-18), he came in third. That’s a four-year span of .681 True Shooting, best in the league over that period. Damn.

.494

If you read this space a lot, you know that I’m of the opinion that Mike Conley’s struggles have been dramatically overstated. Outside of a short adjustment period in October and another round of struggles when he wasn’t healthy, Conley has been pretty good, but drops in both minutes and usage made his decline in raw stats look worse than they were. Actually, his per-36 numbers this season were right in line with his career averages: rounded, he averaged 18-6-4 per 36 minutes this season, compared to 17-6-3 for his career. His eFG was also right in the same range: .494 this season, .498 carer.

9th / 13th

The Jazz finished the year ranked 9th in overall offense, the first time in the Quin Snyder era that they have cracked the top 10. They were actually the third-best offense in the league from Christmas on. They also finished the year 13th on defense, which is equally weird since it’s the first time since Gobert was promoted to the starting lineup that they finished *outside* the top 10. Particularly weird for a Gobert-led defense was the fact that they ranked 16th in opponent FG% at the rim. (For context, they were #3 last year.) They remain elite at limiting those rim opportunities, though. 

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

I’ve never seen a unanimous Twitter poll before, on any subject — until now. I asked, and you told me unequivocally that you’d rather look at plays/concepts that might help Utah against Denver rather than look at some specific play from the past week where Utah’s third string players were up against the Spurs’ or Mavs’ third string players. Fair enough.

Force Jokic to guard the slot

Nikola Jokic isn’t a great pick-and-roll defender, but he’s not a joke on that end, either. He’s understands offensive principles enough to show in the right places and cut off certain passing angles.

But he’s just nowhere near as mobile as Gobert, so one way the Jazz have been trying to pry open driving lanes is by pulling the Joker away from the middle of the lane. Here’s a series of plays where the guard drives down the slot (another name for the outside edge of the key) and forces Jokic to move over. Once he scoots out to defend the slot, he just can’t get back to the rim quickly enough to contest there, and that’s good news for the Jazz’s rolling bigs — most often Gobert.

Gobert is going to need to have a great series, and one way to do that is by having the guards put pressure on Jokic. If he commits to them in the slot, Gobert has a cleaner path to the rim. Jokic tries to get back, but manages little more than a hand wave at that point.

Honestly, this might be part of what Mitchell was describing above. If you’re hell-bent on getting to the rim yourself, you might fail to recognize that the best way to win the chess match is to do something different so that the team has a better chance of scoring. This is like a knight drawing out a rook so that the bishop can safely attack.

Punish Jokic for showing high

Of course, sometimes Jokic shows high, which I completely fail to understand. That’s just not what he’s good at, and whenever he scoots out to soft-trap a guard, I wonder what on earth the Nuggets are thinking. Jokic has little chance at getting back in front after he has surrendered the inside lane, as he does here by needlessly jumping towards Mitchell who is 45 feet from the basket.

The Jazz will look to catch Jokic showing too high, and when they do, some subtle tricks will help them neutralize the backside help. Like here:

This is actually pretty brilliant. On the initial Gobert-Mitchell DHO, the designated helper is the weakside corner defender: Monte Morris. And he knows it, correctly sliding over to the “help line.” But as soon as the pass is made out front to Ingles, Morris is no longer the weak corner man, and he feels compelled to get back to Conley. Of course, Jokic can’t recover to Gobert that quickly, so Morris should stay put, but technically he’s following the scheme when the ball moves to the middle and he shifts back toward his man.

If you watch only Morris on that play, you’ll see how effective that one pass is at blowing up Denver’s helping scheme as Jokic shows aggressively.

And here, Jokic sort of soft traps (but doesn’t really) and again the help defense is absent. 

Jokic is supposed to show here, to slow Mitchell so that Craig can go over the screen and still get back in front. But Gobert, knowing that, slips the pick. Now, Jokic isn’t really sure whether to show on Mitchell or get back to Gobert. He doesn’t really do either.

Meanwhile, Morris seems to think this is Paul Millsap’s help. It’s not, and I’m not sure why Morris thinks that. Maybe because Mitchell is coming off the pick to the right, so he incorrectly calculates that the left corner is the weak corner. Whatever the reason, all Morris does on this play is point a few times toward Millsap. Super helpful.

Disguised guard screens to peel Craig off Mitchell

Finally, I shared this video elsewhere, but it’s important enough to this series that we’ll drop it here as well.

In each of these plays, a guard sets a screen for Mitchell to get him a switch or at least an advantage over Craig, an excellent on-ball defender. On the first two (the video starts late on the second), an early screen from a wing gives Mitchell the opportunity to get away from Craig. Both times, Craig doesn’t want to switch, but can’t leave a shooter open from one pass away, so he eventually (and reluctantly) recedes. And then Mitchell goes to work.

On the third play in that video, the Jazz disguise the play by making it look like a handoff for the wing coming out of the corner, a very common action in their core offense. Instead, that wing beelines to Mitchell’s man and sets a pick to bring Mitchell to that handoff. Craig tries to fight through it but can’t get back.

The Jazz are going to need Mitchell to have a tremendous series, which makes the Mitchell-Craig matchup almost as important as the Gobert-Jokic one. Little actions like this could help Mitchell get going.

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

Jazz 118, Spurs 112: Ed Davis.

Giving a Game Ball after this one feels borderline sacrilegious. Neither team involved in Utah’s season finale had much reason to care about the outcome, so it was basically a battle of deep benches by the end, yet we’ll still award the same symbolic hunk of leather we used to celebrate Bojan Bogdanovic’s walk-off threes, numerous late-game defensive heroics by Gobert, or all the times Mitchell went supernova to carry Utah to a win. In other words, not all Game Balls are created equal, but we still have to account for Utah’s 44th win.

Davis was the tweeps’ choice after putting together his best eight minutes as a Jazzman. He had 11 points and six boards in the game’s first half before a reckless rebound challenge by a free throw shooter sent the veteran to the locker room early. He scored opportunisitcally under the boards, but also completed some pick-and-roll layups, which had been precisely the weakness that cost him a rotation spot last winter. The other Game Ball candidate, Rayjon Tucker, had 16 of his career-high 18 after halftime as the Jazz’s C-team held off the Spurs’ reserves, but Davis’ big stretch came as the Jazz were pulling away. The Jazz put the Spurs away for good with a 23-11 run, and the big man had nearly half of those points. Miye Oni also had a very nice two-way game.

A quick look ahead at Utah’s next seven nights of action.

Here’s what’s ahead for the Jazz:

Best of seven. Here we go.

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

This is bigger (and smaller) than basketball.

View this post on Instagram

@livinglereve and baby are doing great! In the words of our oldest son , “Welcome to the world Lightning Thunder Michael Alex Conley”! 😂 We settled on Elijah Michael Conley instead.. close enough though. What an awesome reminder of what’s important in life and what motivates us to be better! ✊🏾#mommydidgreat #blessed

A post shared by MIKE CONLEY (@mac10) on Aug 16, 2020 at 3:59pm PDT

Congratulations to the Conleys! The Jazz will miss Mike over the course of however many games he misses, but he absolutely made the right call to rush to meet this little fella. 

That’s a wrap on another season of the Salt City Seven column! Thanks for following along. Of course, while this column is a regular season feature, we’ll still be covering the 2020 playoffs here at Salt City Hoops, so stay tuned for more from this writer and the rest of the SCH team.