What Matters Most to Transitioning Jazz, Part 2: Development & Identity

Fans are having fun with the Jazz’s 7-3 start. (Photo: Dan Clayton)

With every gutsy win the Utah Jazz pile up, it’s getting harder to talk about them like a true rebuilding team. But if we’re being honest, this is still a Jazz group whose success in the longer term won’t really be defined by wins and losses.

Unless you think the current Jazz team is headed for title contention as constituted — and they’re almost certainly not — then this season will ultimately become about longer-term questions rather than game-to-game results. That doesn’t mean anybody should stop rooting for their team to win, but ultimately the ways in which “Team 49,” as new coach Will Hardy is fond of referring to this Jazz crew, contributes to the long-term competitiveness of the franchise will largely be about other things.

This column continues last week’s treatise on how one columnist is most interested in consuming Jazz basketball in 2022-23. As outlined there, one of the biggest answers for Jazz brass to ascertain this season in which Jazz players are most likely to be part of the next great Jazz core. Here we’ll dissect a couple more important questions to sort through.

Whether the Jazz unexpectedly make a playoff push, or level off as a lottery team, or even start a 72-game losing streak tonight in Los Angeles to finish 7-75, there are still ways to make this year an unqualified success regardless of win totals.

Reading each player’s potential Jazz future

The conclusion in part one of this exercise was: Lauri Markkanen and Collin Sexton will both have a chance to lead on this transitional roster, then there are rookies whose contractual realities could make them long-term Jazzmen, and a handful of young veterans who could re-commit after short-term deals. Those nine guys are all more likey to be part of a future contending version of the Jazz than the club’s 30-somethings or the two end-of-roster youngsters who just became pending free agents. 

Development trajectories

If we grant the premise than certain players are more likely to be on Utah’s roster and contributing two, four, six years from now because of their ages, contracts and profiles, then the Jazz should prioritize those guys’ minutes at the expense of anybody less likely to be part of the future, right?

Not so fast.

Few things are as misunderstood by even die-hard NBA fans as the relationship between development and playing time. Getting minutes doesn’t automatically mean you’re developing as a player, and in fact getting rewarded with an unearned role can actually undermine the process of getting better.

Look at the last Jazz rebuild: would former top-3 pick Enes Kanter’s career have played out any differently if his early minutes had been contingent on him showing a willingness to put in the work in practice and individual skill sessions? Would Trey Burke’s? Maybe, maybe not. We don’t get to find out. The same story has played out with dozens of talented youngsters who were gifted a role based on raw talent and upside, potentially removing some of the motivation to really study how to contribute to winning in the team context.

Because we don’t see practice, it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of thinking that “development” can only happen on the arena floor. In fact, the opposite is undoubtedly true. Players are constantly working behind the scenes to enhance their games and address weaknesses, with myriad coaches, trainers and video gurus ready to help them get the most of their time in the lab. That’s why in the best basketball cultures, playing time is the product of development, not the other way around.

The coaches who see all those hours of behind-the-scenes work undoubtedly have a better sense than us of whether a player is ready to execute a game plan and help the team compete. Veteran reporter Marc Spears made that point tangentially on a recent ESPN podcast. The group was discussing press access to practices as part of the discussion around a Warriors scrimmage incident, and that caused Spears to remember just how much he gleaned by being allowed inside the practice gym early in his career. 

“You could tell how good a player is, and why they’re not starting, and how lazy they are. Everything,” Spears said. “You get to see the behind the scenes part.”

Which leads to the other crucial point about why playing a guy before he’s ready hurts your program: everybody in that practice gym who knows the game of basketball would know that the coach is full of crap next time he tries to tell the group, “Play the right way and I will reward you.”

Hardy appears to have the current Jazz group believing in his vision, but let’s not forget that he’s a first-time head coach still trying to establish credibility in a locker room with guys literally older than him. How would players feel about their new basketball boss if he set clear expectations around the behaviors and skills that lead to minutes — but then ignored them and instead just doled out playing time assignments based on age or contract length? As a coach, if you’re going to go to the trouble of definining, “here are the things that matter to us as a unit,” you kind of have to abide by that or risk being seen as inauthentic. Worse, you don’t just remove the young player’s incentive to earn his playing time, but you also demotivate everybody else on your roster from wanting to play the right way.

There’s a Stan Van Gundy quote about the spiritual role of a coach that I think about way more often than a sane person should. He was explaining at a sports analytics conference why he doesn’t coach for two-for-ones at the ends of quarters, and he said that he feels disingenuous preaching about getting the right kinds of shots and then being OK with a player who “jacks up some horseshit shot” just to set up the extra possession. He said that decision affects everybody else on the team and how much they want to execute within your philosophy.

“One of the things in coaching is you’re trying to create a style of play and a culture that this is how we play the game,” Van Gundy elaborated. “And every time you make an exception to that and say, ‘OK, this is how we play the game, but not in this case, in this case you’re allowed to throw up whatever crap you want,’ then you’re breaking down your system a little bit.”

That perspective on all the fundamental, philosophical things a coach is balancing with every micro and macro decision is in my brain non-stop. If a coach tells his guys what matters on a cultural level and then contradicts that with his game-to-game decisions, that erodes the group’s commitment to its basketball principles. In SVG’s mind, that happens when a coach abandons his tenets on shot quality and selflessness to sneak in an extra possession. The same could be true of handing minutes to a guy who everybody in the practice gym knows is not ready to do what the coach asks. Either way, there is a cultural cost that comes with each one of those little compromises. That matters.

There are just so many things you can screw up by playing guys for the wrong reasons.

All of this is a really long way of saying this: the Jazz’s younger players will get on the court when they’ve earned their way onto the court, and that’s a GOOD thing from a long-term perspective. In the meantime, Hardy will likely trust guys he knows can execute what was on the clipboard, even if that means playing someone who has less upside, clearly isn’t part of the long-term future, or whom you personally don’t like.

Still, watching this all play out is fascinating, and one of my favorite things about watching a team that’s in any sort of a rebuilding phase. The Jazz already have one rookie — Walker Kessler — who has earned a rotation spot by understanding what Hardy wants and being able to execute the game plan on both ends. Hardy is also playing 21-year-old Talen Horton-Tucker, about whom most fans are ambivalent at best but who has some NBA knowhow after logging 3,000 Laker minutes. (For the record, I’d personally be fine with less THT too, but I understand why Hardy goes there.) Jarred Vanderbilt and Collin Sexton are both 23 and are among the team’s top seven minute-getters.

So Hardy doesn’t appear to have a blanket aversion to playing young guys, but there are clearly some prerequisites in terms of getting court time — and trust me, Jazz fans, that’s the way you want it. Guys like Ochai Agbaji and Simone Fontecchio will have plenty of opportunities to get better behind the scenes, and eventual injuries, trades and/or rest will open the door for them to show us their progress reports.

And even the guys who play have plenty of things they can continue to hone that are super relevant to future team-building. If Vanderbilt becomes a true 3-and-D guy, if Markkanen continues to defend well, if Sexton transforms into a table-setter… those kinds of evolutions could really accelerate Utah’s transitional period and give the club a lot of options on how to imagine themselves getting better.

Basketball identity

The other thing I’m watching for is a better grasp on how their basketball identity and systems will take shape, both now and into the future.

That starts with getting a better X-and-O understanding today. By the end of the Quin Snyder era, I had a solid enough understanding of core schemes and pet plays to be able to watch a sequence and be fairly certain who had blown a rotation or forgotten to cut. By contrast, we’re just getting familiar with Hardy’s playbook, and the defensive strategies have so far been more varied. (Snyder was way more adaptive with opponent-specific adjustments to his core schemes than average fans give him credit for, but so far in the Hardy era I don’t even know what I’d call the “core” scheme. They’ve been a bit more chameleon-like on defense through 10 games.) So even just figuring out the basics in the near term is a top priority in how I’m watching games.

Here are some things I’ve noticed so far:

• The Jazz know their rim protection isn’t great, and that has shifted the risk-reward calculation about gambling versus staying home. They’re far more willing to go for steals, throw a random trap at an opponent, and otherwise just be disruptors.
• Because they aren’t organized around a single roll man, they seem to go hunting for minus defenders a bit more blatantly. And the skill level across multiple positions has them trying more varied pick-and-rolls: inverted, guard-to-guard, big-to-big.
• The superb ball sharing is generating a lot of threes, and particularly above-the-break threes.
• Eventually they’ll have to figure out how to put more pressure on defenses; their rim attempts and rim finishing are both average, and they generate the second fewest free throws as a proportion of shot attempts. Right now they mostly drive to collapse the defense and then kick.

But I’m also referring to the broader identity shift that will inevitably happen when the Jazz figure out who their next core is. For example, the style of play changed abruptly in early 2015 when the Jazz started to realize what they had in Rudy Gobert. Eventually, if things go right, the Jazz will have a player (or players) good enough to define the way they play. Then they can determine what is needed to complement the ecosystem that will maximize that star or set of stars. Maybe someone like Markkanen or Sexton will be part of that answer, with further development. Maybe it will be answered through the draft. Maybe the Jazz will compile assets at some point in attempt to acquire a defining player via trade.

The Jazz’s early success has been a welcome surprise. But as I’ve said before, the Jazz’s top priority in this transitional phase is to figure out how to open their next contention window. Eventually, that will mean that future-focused questions are bound to supercede wins and losses as the main focus on a night-to-night basis.