The Finally-Balanced Jazz Eye Contention After Years of Pendulum Swings

The Jazz tweaked and adjusted until they could assemble this trio of All-Stars with the right supporting cast. (Melissa Majchrzak via espn.com)

The Utah Jazz front office has long been reputed as one of the best when it comes to talent scouting and roster construction, at least when it comes to forming a winning regular season team. For the greater part of the last decade, the Jazz have excelled at finding diamonds in the draft, from G-League and Europe, or using trades and signing to add the right complementary rotation players who seem to gel with the team perfectly. There’s been some misfires on all these areas, but by and large the front office has been successful.

This process has been a different tact than what is used by many teams, who rely on trades and free agent signings or even collecting and hoarding lottery picks. The Jazz have been able to execute on a multi-faceted and multi-year approach to building a team that owned the NBA’s best record last season and hopes of to repeat this year and then push the envelope further with postseason success.

Let’s step back through time and watch how this process has unfolded.

Dennis Lindsey, who recently ended his 9-year tenure as Utah’s general manager when he stepped down in June, was the mastermind largely responsible for the team the Jazz developed over years of moves and decisions that culminated in a top seeded team last year.

These moves happened with only a small number of minor changes in personnel over the last five seasons. Sometimes major pieces were added to the “core,” but the whole of the team remained steady through each phase. And each offseason has moved the team closer to the ultimate goal: winning a championship.

The Pendulum Swing Towards Elite Defense

Imagine a pendulum, where the neutral resting position at the six o’clock position represents a championship or championship-caliber team.  Teams with weaknesses in one direction or another will attempt to swing their pendulum the other way with the goal of landing in that championship-worthy zone, but it’s easy to overcorrect. Typically, a pendulum utilizes its own momentum to continue swinging. In this case, let’s say that swinging left represents roster and personnel changes or strategy and tactic shifts. Throughout the season, problems become clear on the roster or with the strategy. These represent momentum swinging to the right of neutral. The challenge is making moves in the off-season that don’t swing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.  

The Jazz’s pendulum has been swinging for decades, but let’s focus on the four years since their yin and yang offseason where Gordon Hayward departed but Donovan Mitchell joined the Jazz via draft. This moved the pendulum farther to the left. Throughout the course of the season, several glaring holes were readily visible, swinging the pendulum all the way to the right. 

Ricky Rubio was brought in to be a playmaker to replace George Hill (who had a fantastic season, maybe one of his career best, despite playing only half the season). Rubio, however, is not a three-point threat. The dual-big frontcourt of Derrick Favors and Rudy Gobert exacerbated some of those spacing problems.

A team lacking consistent 3-point ability missed too many important shots, and we saw night after night where defenses clogged the paint as a result. Utah still made it a successful season with their rookie leading the way, ultimately reaching the second round. But the holes were glaring. They were obvious and they pushed the pendulum up and to the right (in the worst way).

They finished the season with a top defense and a below-average offense, a lot of which was due to the Favors/Gobert/Rubio trio causing such poor spacing.

Lindsey and the team staff looked to counter some of these problems with mid-season and off-season changes.

Add Spacing, Lose Bench Defense

From there, the objective seemed clear. Fix the offensive and spacing issues and hope Gobert’s singular talent as a paint protector would be enough to anchor another top 5 defense. In other words, the pendulum swung back the other way.

The Jazz added Bojan Bogdanovic and Mike Conley to replace a pair of non outside-shooting starters. They acquired Jordan Clarkson mid-season to add shooting and dynamism to their bench. But once again, this swing brought its own costs and overcorrections. Favors, who had been filling in in most of the backup center minutes behind Gobert in addition to his 10 or so nightly minutes at PF, left for New Orleans. This constituted a big step back for the second-team defense.

The new offensive talents unlocked the vision Quin Snyder had been building toward for a few seasons, for the most part. The spacing was beautiful. Gobert could roll to the rim without getting jammed. The lane was clear for a driving Conley or Mitchell. Shooters dotted the perimeter and the Jazz would build towards being a historically prolific 3-point shooting team.

But the pendulum swung too far: offense improvements came at the expense of the the defense. The Gobert-led defense was still phenomenal in the center’s minutes, but the non-Rudy minutes were a disaster on that end. Conley was still adjusting to the team, Donovan was still growing as a player.

Smaller Swings As Jazz Approach Contention

The pendulum was getting closer to that optimal resting position, as the Jazz were only a few minor incremental changes away. Over the course of several seasons with a well-guided and patient process, all those corrections and adjustments finally culminated in a top-seeded team with championship aspirations. The Jazz brought Favors back to relieve Rudy as the second unit center, and even though he seemed to have lost a step, it worked overall. Derrick was capable of playing against starting units, which let Snyder deploy the Gobert-Conley tandem against opposing bench players. Those minutes were devastating to opposing teams, with two Jazz All-Stars leading a hybrid bench unit capable of boatracing opposing reserves.

More importantly, the Jazz were no longer unable to manage that defense-offense balance that had eluded them. Per Cleaning the Glass, which filters out garbage time, the Jazz finished the 2020-21 season with the best per-possession defense and the third best offense. No other team in the league finished in the top five in both. 

With that balance finally achieved, another hole became obvious in the Jazz’s series against the LA Clippers: the lack of rotation flexibility prevented the Jazz from stopping the 5-out strategy used in the second-round¹.

The Last Tweaks?

The final shift to today’s team makes the strategy obvious. Keep roughly the same core, which finally struck a balance on the pendulum that proved successful and championship-capable, while addressing the holes from the past season. The Jazz addressed their lack of flexibility in the roster by adding three very different NBA big men: Eric Paschall,  Rudy Gay and Hassan Whiteside. The latter will primarily fill the backup role behind Gobert in the Favors mold, but Gay and Paschall give them some options to play a slightly different way in certain situations.

Each season, the problems were identified and addressed. Each time, the team got better and more balanced — even if it wasn’t always immediately clear in the record or postseason outcomes. And each time, the pendulum swing needed to zero in on championship contention was slightly smaller. This time around, they’ll bring back the top seven players from a rotation that produced elite offensive and defensive results, complemented by flexible and versatile end-of-rotation pieces. 

Ideally, the pendulum can now stop shifting and a Jazz team with few obvious glaring issues can finally reach for an NBA championship.