Salt City Seven: Value of Ws, Youth on Display, Zipper Action

Utah’s increasingly turning things over to the 23-and-under crowd. (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. 

Telling or interesting words from Jazz people

The Jazz just played a full week’s worth of opponents who are in troubled waters for different reasons, meaning a win somewhere was probably inevitable. Atlanta’s teetering around .500 and has starters out, Miami is team drama, Phoenix is rethinking its whole rotation on the fly, and Brooklyn has temporarily shut down nearly every good player left on their team. Utah finished the week 1-3, but the lone victory of the season still aggrieved the segment of fans who have tankathon.com as their browser’s home page.

And hey, I get it. We knew what this season was going to be about, and having the pain tolerance for it in the short term makes it less likely that the Jazz have to do this again and again to get back to having a competitive roster. The Jazz are approaching this season the right way, and that includes by routinely giving good players the night off, like they did in Sunday’s win.

The Jazz still beat the Nets anyway, and Will Hardy wants us all to know that’s not some big tragedy. Here was what he said (without being questioned about it, by the way) after Utah improved to 10-28.

“Losing can wear on people’s desire to do the things that aren’t fun, to do the hard things, and to stick together and to make it about the group. I cannot emphasize enough that our team has continued to maintain the spirit of a team… I never want them to lose that.”

No team is going to go 0-82. Even if you’re Team Tank, it’s OK to be a little happy for the guys when they get these rare moments to celebrate. If it helps them stay focused on all the things they have to keep doing to make this season mean something on a developmental level, then it’s not a colossal tragedy to win every four of five times out. (They’re currently on a 21.5-win pace.)

Against Brooklyn, the Jazz obviously did about all they could from an organizational standpoint to turn this into a coin toss, which against the Nets’ own shadow team was the best they could do. Five of their six best players sat. Rookie and two-way guys made up most of the rotation. Lump the rooks and two-ways in wit second-year forward Brice Sensabaugh, who played under 600 minutes last season as a late first-round pick, and that group accounts for 70% of the rotation and 67% of the Jazz’s Sunday minutes.

The Nets did the same, making this a pretty random game. Their top five scorers for the season were all either sitting or have been traded. Tosan Evbuomwan, signed 11 days earlier to a two-way deal, led the team in scoring.

Both teams rolled out lineups that had never played before. It would be like if you got 20 of the world’s best 600-ish basketball players (but none of the top 80) in a gym and just shot for teams — in that you know what some of those guys can do on an individual level, but nobody really has any clue what the collective product would look like.

Hardy talked about that, too, saying, “There were lineups out there we’ve never seen and had never thought of until yesterday.” The Jazz had guys playing out of their usual spots and roles, and I promise you they also didn’t have a scouting packet ready on Nic Claxton, second-year Jalen Wilson, and three two-way guys, which wound up being Brooklyn’s most used lineup.

The resulting randomness is why Brooklyn took an 8-point advantage early. It’s also why Utah was able to spark a 21-point swing to lead by 13 midway through the fourth, and why the Nets outscored them 17-4 in the end of regulation. It was a weird game.

Once it got to overtime, the only NBA-proven natural scorer in the game, Collin Sexton, scored five straight and gave Utah the inside lane. But even then, on a do-or-die final possession, they put the ball in the hands of a 3.4-ppg scorer. Isaiah Collier capped his best professional performance with a game-winning layup, but that’s probably not where you go most nights.

Brooklyn missed 12 free throws. Svi Mykhailiuk hit four threes. At a certain point, you just shrug and enjoy the moment.

The Jazz have plenty more losses coming. Sure, they host the lotto-bound Hornets on Wednesday, but overall, the East has more teams in a blatant rebuild state, and those teams have to play each other more often. And we still don’t even know what their rotation could look like after the trade deadline on February 6.

HOME/away

By rule, every NBA game has to have a winner. Given that there are more middling-to-bad teams in the East, there will be games like Sunday’s where someone simply has to take the W. Toronto has 10 more such games than the Jazz, including 13 against the dregs. Only the Pelicans have fewer games where winning could become unavoidable, but they might flirt with competitiveness for a bit now that they’re starting to get players back (they’re 3-3 in their last six, and play the Jazz three times yet).

Beyond these seven, everybody else is at least five wins ahead of the Jazz, and the closest (#8 Philly and #9 Chicago) are trying to be competitive.

The overarching point here is that it’s silly to be upset at the Jazz for winning a game that the brass was clearly OK losing. They and the Nets did just about everything reasonable to make this game a toss-up, and ultimately Utah’s youngs and two-ways just outlasted Brooklyn’s youngs and two-ways. It will happen again — for Utah, and for the others in the NBA’s bottom seven.

And if Hardy believes that an occasional random W will keep guys interested in all the little things that will help them grow, then I’ll believe him.

A quick exploration of a big-picture topic

Let’s go quick here since I went out of order (and long) on the Hardy quote.

Another thing I’m super interested in is Lauri Markkanen’s ineffable dip in 2-point percentage. We’ve talked in these columns about how the Finn is making it a point to hunt threes, which is a legitimately great development despite the fact that the rather bold diet out there has cost him some efficiency. But it’s weird just how ineffective he’s been inside the arc, like in a 2-for-9 performance from 2-point range on Thursday.

The league on average shoots 69.1% at 0-3 feet. Markkanen’s at 60.5% despite being both huge and athletic. The delta is even more pronounced on mid-range shots (10-16 feet) where the league hits 43.2% and he’s at 27.8%, despite a great shooting touch.

At some point we’ll come back to this, but right know my working theory is that it’s a combination of three factors:

• Experimentation: the Jazz are trying different things with him, so he’s operating at the fringes of his comfort zone.
• Teammate quality: because he spends a lot of time on the court with non-shooting threats, spacing isn’t always great wen he puts the ball on the deck.
• Schemes: Related to the above, teams love throwing extra help at Markkanen, and seem to especially swarm him late on a drive after he’s already made the first read.

Like I said, this deserves more than a passing mention and a couple of paragraphs. For now, just something to monitor.

Stats that tell the story of the week

0-23

The Jazz have not won a game this year in which they trailed going to the fourth quarter. Only Washington (0-30) is worse. The flip side, of course, is that if the Jazz can enter the final frame with a lead or tied, they’re 10-5.

40%

Hat tip to Richie Ostler here: the Jazz are one of just two teams in the association with four or more leaderboard-qualified shooters hitting 40% or better from three. John Collins, Collin Sexton, Brice Sensabaugh and Johnny Juzang are all there. (League-leading Cleveland now has five guys.)

13

One thing I’ve been kind of surprised by is how little they’re experimenting with P&Rs where Markkanen handles. Seems like that would be something worth just checking on in a season where wins don’t matter a whole ton, but he’s only had 13 scoring chances (or TOs) all season that were generated from him being the P&R handler. Mykhailiuk has more plays than that, with 21! (I also find it interesting how often Mykhailiuk handles the ball in general recently, but that’s a whole other thing.)

24

The Jazz’s last two outings were their two best of the year for ball security. Well, technically the 11 turnovers against Brooklyn were a season low, and the 13 at Phoenix were tied for second lowest. The 24 combined turnovers from those two games are a total the Jazz have matched or exceeded in four single games this year. And Nets-Jazz included five extra minutes, too!

3-0

They’ve had fewer turnovers than their opponents just three times all season (including vs. the Nets) and they won all three times.

Dissecting a Jazz scoring play from the week

Lately the Jazz have been running this little disguised zipper action for Markkanen — including almost back-to-back when the Jazz needed an answer to a 12-0 Atlanta run on Tuesday.

The core action here is his “zipper” cut, where he zooms right up the middle of the court to catch the ball and fire away. But the Jazz cleverly hide their intensions here and maket his really hard to guard.

On both plays, the Finnish forward starts by “denying” a wide pindown. On one play, that action results in Markkanen getting a smaller defender on him, because the Hawks were switching everything at that moment. But on both plays, the result of starting with this little bit of fluff is that Markkanen goes to the paint with a defender already trailing him, because they have to honor that first off-ball screen. Markkanen comes off of that screen all the damn time for open threes.

So with the defender a half step behind him, he then fakes like he’s going to set a paint cross screen. Now both his and Walker Kessler’s defender have to be vigilant in order to not give up the lob, but really Markkanen’s doing this to freeze the D before he sprints into the zipper cut. (On both, somewhat amusingly, Kessler appears to forget to make it look like he’s using the screen to sell the decoy action, but it doesn’t matter. Lauri gets tons of space.)

One little extra Sexton pindown at the end of the play is enough to give Markkanen a cushion.

Lauri is getting so smart at manipulating all of these off-ball actions and knowing the counters to everything opponents deploy to dead end the play. This is an elite off-ball scoring threat, paired with a clever play designer in Hardy.

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

The Game Ball department had an easy week this time, since the only one up for grabs was an easy call.

Jazz 112, Nets 111: Isaiah Collier. Collier nearly doubled his previous career high, and might have gotten into more earnest Triple Double Watch territory (23-7-7) if he didn’t have to the leave the game for blood control and concussion protocols. But beyond that, it was a breakout shooting performance for someone who entered the game with a 16% rate on threes, and it culminated in him making the game-winning shot after pushing the ball ahead through two defenders. This was an easy call, despite Sexton’s five in OT (21 overall) and Mykhailiuk and Sensabaugh both having big stretches (16 each).

Strong in defeat:

• Jazz 121, Hawks 124: Lauri Markkanen. Kessler had 10 of his 21 in the fourth, just continually keeping possessions alive when the Jazz offense had otherwise come up short. But Lauri’s 35 and eight threes make this a short discussion. Second runner-up is Sexton, whose 24 included the three that might have forced overtime if Trae Young hadn’t sold his soul to some cosmic basketball entity that enabled a 49-foot buzzer beater.
• Jazz 92, Heat 97: Collin Sexton. Let’s go Young Bull on this one, since Markkanen’s 23 came on less than a point per shot. Kessler arguably outplayed Bam Adebayo for the second time in a week, but Sexton had 23 points on efficient shooting, and also doled out five assists. Collier’s nine helpers were also nice. 
• Jazz 106, Suns 114: Walker Kessler. Kessler honestly gets bilked out of way too many of these things. Almost every game he plays, we include him in the “also considered” dialogue, and in this one he shot 7/9, pounded in a double-double (16 and 13), and again did a ton of his best work in the fourth, when he had six of his points and four of his boards. Cody Williams had his highest-scoring game yet (13), and Mykhailiuk dished seven assists as one of the main bench pick-and-roll facilitators. 

Looking ahead to the next seven nights of action

The Jazz just wrapped a 4-in-6-nights stretch, and their reward is a nice calm week with just two games and a single flight:

• Wednesday, January 15: Jazz vs. Hornets. LaMelo Ball’s 30 a game (rounded) are enough that this 8-win team will likely get an All-Star starter in ahead of Jalen Brunson or Dame Lillard. Brandon Miller’s also taking a bigger load in year two, but so far it hasn’t really translated into wins. The Hornets have just one victory in their last 12 times out, and they aren’t even really resting a ton of guys. They are the worst shooting team in the league (by FG%, eFG% and 2FG%). Longtime Jazz assistant Lamar Skeeter is now assisting Charles Lee. 
• Friday, January 17: Jazz @ Pelicans. The Jazz get both of their games against the Pelicans out of the way in a single trip to the Big Easy. The Pels are perhaps the most snake-bitten team in the NBA this year, with each of their eight top guys having missed at least a dozen games at some point throughout the year. But they’re getting healthy again, with Zion Williamson having played in two of their last four, and others on the mend as well. Of the main guys, really only Brandon Ingram and Herb Jones are still missing in action, and consequently they’re 3-3 in their last six, after an 11-game skid.

Random stuff from the Jazz community

There are a lot of ways for a team to get functionally younger. The Jazz roster is tied for fifth youngest at 25.1, but they feel even younger than that will all of the minutes and possessions going to veritable kiddos. There’s actually a metric for that, and it’s a fun way to look at the youth movement.

The folks at nbaage.com look at roster age, but also calculate age as weighted by minutes played and possessions used. So somebody like Patty Mills is obviously bringing Utah raw age up, but if he rarely plays, is that an accurate reflection of the Jazz’s on-court identity?

And when you look at teams through that lens, the Jazz are actually the youngest team in the league in terms of who’s actually doing the lifting.

The five youngest teams when weighted by usage, and the highest FGA guy under 25 for each. Source: nbaage.com

We hit the halfway point on Monday!