What We Really Just Saw As Jazz Collapsed Versus Clippers

When Donovan Mitchell’s foot slid out from under him on this jab step midway through Game 2, the Jazz-Clippers series changed.

A playoff collapse like the one the Utah Jazz just experienced demands scrutiny. Utah jumped out to a 2-0 series lead even without All-Star guard Mike Conley Jr. in the lineup, and then lost four straight games in increasingly perplexing ways. In a win-or-go-home Game 6, the Jazz led by 25 points early in the third quarter and still found a way to lose by double digits. So yeah, some examination is in order, and Jazz personnel from top to bottom should be feeling somewhat uncomfortable after that.

But that also means the moment calls for better than just blanket acceptance of the prevailing narratives. It behooves the Jazz — and others who care about Jazz basketball — to find real answers as to how this series turned so sharply, even though the Clippers lost Kawhi Leonard before Game 5 and the injured Serge Ibaka never made an appearance in the series. A lot of people are rushing to peddle convenient tropes on what the ill-timed skid says about different Jazz pieces, and that’s fair — but many of them aren’t actually looking closely enough to offer anything even approaching accurate.

The Jazz have a peculiar construction by modern NBA standards, so it’s understandable for NBA fans and pundits to process anything that happens to the club as being a treatise on whether the things that make them unique actually work. That’s why the NBA universe has been filled with bold pronouncements on Quin Snyder, Rudy Gobert, and the Jazz as a whole.

They’re mostly wrong.

There are certainly things for the Jazz to learn from this collapse — even hard lessons with implications about their construction going forward. But let’s make sure we’re looking at the right things.

Here are the biggest factors in Utah’s inauspicious postseason close.

Guard Health

Every so often, you can trace the moment the dynamic of a series changed to a single moment. In almost every such case, the moment in question involves a player wincing in pain. 

Leonard himself collapsing in Game 1 of the 2017 Western Conference Finals, with his team up 21. Kevin Durant signaling to the sidelines from the seat of his pants in the 2019 Finals, his Warriors up five in an elimination game.

The moment pictured atop this article, with 5:08 left in the second quarter of Jazz-Clippers Game 2, similarly redefined everything about the series.

Prior to that moment, Donovan Mitchell was getting anything he wanted, and against any kind of Clipper defense. They tried switching, and Mitchell licked his proverbial chops before shredding favorable switches. They dropped the big, and Mitchell attacked. They brought high pressure, and Mitchell carved it up.

Nothing the Clippers did bothered Mitchell at all. He frequently got wherever he wanted to go, which usually meant getting both feet in the paint and forcing five defenders to react to him.

Then, midway through the second quarter of Game 2, Mitchell went to plant his right foot on the jab step pictured above, and his previously injured ankle buckled ever so slightly. The All-Star guard visibly winced and gave up the ball immediately. After that moment, he was noticeably less aggressive. He still scored boatloads — a testament to his expanding skill set and killer instinct. But he was mostly pulling up into jump shots, stopping short on drives, scoring on acrobatic finishes on drives that had him straddling the paint. But he was no longer able to manipulate the defense however and whenever he wanted. He had maybe two or three plays in the entire second half where he got both feet in the paint with the ball in his hands. He was… different.

For a while, Mitchell played coy about whether or not he retweaked the ankle in that game. But finally, after a Game 5 loss, the dam broke and he finally leveled with reporters about being severely limited.

“This f—ing sucks. I ain’t got nothing else to say,” a frustrated star guard said that night. “It’s tough when you’re trying different things that you normally do and you see spots you can get to but you can’t (get there).”

Mitchell was still a revelation in this series. Even after the ankle tweak, he found a way to average 35-5-5 on 60% true shooting in the series. But his burst was gone. He couldn’t move well laterally, and he couldn’t turn the corner on drives. He was still brilliant, scoring 30 or more in five of the six games in the series. But his game looked different after that moment than it did in the first game and a half.

“For most of my life I’ve been able to push by, explode by and jump through people or over people,” he explained last week. “For the first time in my career, I’ve had to play on the floor.”

While he could still score, he wasn’t able to manipulate the defense in all the same ways, and that rendered the Jazz less effective against the Clippers’ swarming and switching defense. Conley, the team’s other primary offensive creator, is another expert at cracking some of that high pressure, but he was dealing with own injury, a tight hamstring that would limit him to just 26 minutes in the series, all in the finale.

With those two out or ailing, the Jazz just didn’t have the same options to break that pressure and start the blender. Joe Ingles is a fine secondary playmaker when he runs pick-and-roll, but the Clippers’ switching ploy ciphons some of his effectiveness since he’s not really a threat to beat a defender 1-on-1 and get into the teeth of the defense. Jordan Clarkson can break past the first line of defense, but he’s a high-variance guy whose forays into the paint sometimes generate electric scoring displays, and other times tough decisions. (It’s probably no coincidence that Utah’s best half after the Mitchell tweak came while Clarkson scored 21 points on 12 shots before the break in Game 6. Then he went 0-for-4 with a turnover after intermission as the Jazz wilted.)

That’s really all Utah had to generate offense for most of this series: a hobbled Mitchell, a timid Ingles, and a high-variance Clarkson. Bojan Bogdanovic can get his, but usually as an endpoint in the offense, not the guy who gets the gears turning. Royce O’Neale, Miye Oni and Georges Niang mostly depend on others to generate their looks, as do the Jazz’s two diving bigs.

The guard injuries took a toll on the defensive end as well, which we’ll get to shortly. With Conley sidelined and Mitchell unable to move laterally, Clipper guard Reggie Jackson had no problem getting into the paint and triggering desperate rotations and even new schemes by the Jazz. Other times, Mitchell would guard off ball and close out to a shooter, but then didn’t have the ability to change directions and close out a second time when the Clippers rotated the ball.

So yeah, it’s clearly part of the analysis of this series to point out that part of what spelled the Jazz’s doom was the worst possible timing for both of their lead creators to be affected by injuries.

The Clippers had their own injury stuff to deal with. Ibaka never put his sneakers on in the second round, and Leonard didn’t appear in Games 5 or 6. By absolute starpower, Kawhi’s absence should have been a bigger deal, and the Jazz should have been able to capitalize on a top-10 NBA player not suiting up. But injuries don’t really work that way. Star injuries change the whole dynamic of a game or series; they make the game about different things.

In the Clippers’ case, they still had a couple of really reliable ways to generate offense without Leonard. Paul George is an All-NBA talent who has been the lead dog on deep playoff teams before. Jackson is another capable creator; he’s not as good as his 18ppg or 58-50-100 shooting splits from the series indicate, but again, Utah’s guard injuries gave him a lot of weak spots to attack.

So in the end, the Clippers had ways to survive and even thrive without Leonard. The Jazz being down both of their primary offensive engines at once proved a bit much. It left them too reliant on secondary creators who, among other things, were unable to engage the bigs at all. The Clippers guarded the ball aggressively, but also had weakside helpers sitting on the inside passing lanes in a way that prevented Utah from getting Rudy Gobert and Derrick Favors going, even when they towered over smaller guys on switches.

It’s not an excuse to acknowledge that Utah’s guard injuries absolutely made this an easier series for the Clippers, perhaps affecting the Jazz even more than Kawhi’s 2-game absence affected L.A. A hobbled Mitchell and a (mostly) sidelined Conley left them with fewer ways to punish an aggressive Clipper defense that might have been picked apart by a team with two healthy, All-Star level creators.

Defense — but not how you think

Trying to stop a popular NBA fan narrative is like standing in front of a train. But let’s get this out of the way: this series did not say the things about Gobert that many people are claiming it said.

In fact, for much of this series, Gobert was Utah’s best and only chance of really slowing the Clippers down at all, even when they were small and when they abandoned pick-and-roll play altogether to force the 3-time Defensive Player of the Year to guard in space.

To understand this, we have to rewind through all of the different phases of the series. Early on, the Jazz tried to keep Gobert as close to the middle of the court as possible. That meant keeping him involved in screening actions, even when that required a pre-switch. This mostly worked for Utah; the Clippers were getting so little from pick-and-roll play (even with smallball lineups) that eventually they had to try something different.

By the end of Game 2, the Clippers realized that the way to avoid Gobert’s game-changing defensive presence was to stop running pick-and-roll offense almost completely. They committed fully to small lineups and isolation play, and the Jazz’s initial response was to guard them straight up, with man-to-man defense. And in that context, Rudy again was excellent.

Through five games, Gobert was actually Utah’s best isolation defender in the series, per tracking stats shared by JazzFilmRoom’s Ben Dowsett. Gobert wasn’t the reason man defense wasn’t working; everybody else was. George and Jackson had no problem getting right around the first defender, only now there was no Gobert in the paint to offer last-line defensive help.

So the Jazz made another system tweak. By the end of Game 4, Quin Snyder had realized that, while Gobert could hold his own guarding in space, other Jazz defenders were just dying at the point of attack without Gobert behind them to deter drivers. So that’s when he made the decision to let Rudy be Rudy: he started pulling Gobert off of his man to show on drives.

The Jazz had done similar at different points in the season. They played that way against Dallas, with Gobert sagging off of Dorian Finney-Smith. The Jazz won the two games where DFS shot a combined 4/14 (28.6%) on threes, but lost when the Dallas wing hit 5/12 (41.7%) in an April rematch. So the Jazz understand that there’s a make-or-miss component to this strategy. 

Similarly, the gambit actualy helped Utah get back in Game 4, as Gobert turned multiple would-be drivers away from the lane. It was hit-or-miss in Game 5. In the first half of Game 6, it worked fantastically well: the Clippers were shooting just 6-for-20 from outside, and nobody had really punished the Jazz for exposing the perimeter in an attempt to take away layups.

And then the second half happened. The Clippers shot 74% in that second half, and no Jazz defender looked very good in the process — even Gobert.

But it’s important to remember that they were in this scheme to begin with not because of Gobert’s supposed limitations as a perimeter defender, but because of what his teammates were allowing when he wasn’t near the paint.

Jackson had 10 assists in the second half of Game 6 alone, and it’s easy to watch his assist reel and focus on the tough decision at the end of each play — to close out or not to close out? But if you watch what happens at the beginning of these plays, the complete and utter ease with with Jackson dances around various defenders without even needing a pick, then you understand why the Jazz needed so badly needed Gobert to sag into the paint.

Like, what happens on those drives if Gobert ISN’T there? 

“The problem is if I don’t come and help, we give up layups,” a frustrated Gobert said the day after the Game 6 ouster. “The gameplan was for us to let Terance Mann shoot rather than letting Reggie Jackson or PG get layups.”

So yeah, this scheme was never about Rudy’s limitations: it was about the other four guys’ inability to stay in front of the basketball.

Snyder seemed to concur: “There’s things we didn’t execute on, beginning with being able to defend the ball up front.”

Snyder said that he tried variations on the scheme once the Clippers started hitting. Instead of simply letting Mann and others shoot, they started having Gobert stunt or fake the closeout, or they’d rotate down from the top. For a while they even went into zone defense. But the failure on those plays happens way before the ball ever even gets to the shooter’s hands: the Jazz just simply have to be better at guarding the ball.

So what does Utah do with that information? 

They can hope for better from a fully healthy Conley and Mitchell, a reasonable expectation given how much their respective injuries limited lateral mobility. They can add another defensive wing or two, though doing so would likely cut into the roles of one or both of Utah’s super sixth men.

But what they shouldn’t do is conclude that these breakdowns say things about Gobert’s ability to guard 5-out lineups. Even in 24 minutes that were far from his most impactful defensive half of basketball, the Gobert component of these scheme is not what broke down over and over again.

“Teams have spaced Rudy in the strong corner the entire season,” Snyder acknowledged earlier in the series. “To me, it’s a question of how we execute.”

In other words, what the Clippers did to the Jazz was just an extreme version of something they saw all season long on the way to a 52-20 record. It’s not necessarily the sign of a fatal flaw — and certainly not indicative of an inability on Gobert’s part to guard 5-out lineups. Once more for the people in the back: Gobert’s not the reason they had to abandon man defense and employ this riskier scheme.

This was more than just a team getting hot at the wrong moment. The Jazz made some defensive choices about what they would and wouldn’t live with, and now they have to lie in the bed they made. But it is worth noting that those choices looked smart when the Clips shot 6-for-20 in the first half, then disastrous when they shot 14-for-19 on roughly the same looks.

Which leads to one final point.

The Clippers are, umm, really good

Even before the series, we knew this would be a heavyweight matchup between two legit contenders. What we said then is still true: when two contenders face off, somebody has to go home.

The Leonard injury theoretically should have affected the Clippers more, but when you look at their roster construction and versatility, it’s not a complete shock that it didn’t. Paul George is an elite creator, and the Jazz series was his highest scoring playoff series to date (29.0 ppg, on 44-42-90 shooting splits). And Jackson had enough success keeping the Clipper offense afloat while filling in as a starter among injuries that he kept the role once Pat Beverley and others got healthy. Those two mercilessly carved up poor on-ball defense in Games 5 and 6.

But beyond that duo, the Clippers have a deep roster that affords them a lot of different options on how to play. Terance Mann and Luke Kennard — single digit scorers in the regular year — both had huge stretches moments. Marcus Morris seemingly couldn’t miss on long twos, and Nic Batum made more than half his threes. DeMarcus Cousins, who played the 15th most minutes for them in the regular season, gave them surprisingly meaningful minutes in Game 1, something largely forgotten to history since Utah came back to win that game. 

Beverley and Rajon Rondo played more limited roles in this series, and Ivica Zubac saw less action as the games went on. But that’s still a deep roster with legit starpower at the top and a dozen or so guys they trust to play real minutes.

The Jazz have stars atop their depth chart, and impressive “starter depth,” with seven or eight guys who would probably start on at least some NBA teams. But if there’s something they could learn from this loss, it’s that there’s value in shoring up those fringe rotation and deep bench pieces in case you ever need those individuals to step up and play a bigger role.

It’s not an uncommon place to be in for a team that consolidated assets to move into the contender class. The Jazz had to sacrifice some depth and assets to assemble a core with three All-Stars and several guys who are elite in specific roles. Now, they have to slowly add back some of that backend depth by nailing their moves around the margins: exceptions signings, draft choices and minimum-salary pickups.

The Clippers did. Several of the guys who helped turned this series were picked up in those marginal types of moves in the last year or two. Jackson was a buyout signing last season, then re-upped at the minimum. Batum was another minimum-salary pickup. Mann was a second-round pick. Those signings around the margins CAN matter in a playoff series.

For what it’s worth, the Jazz tried: both in last fall’s free agency and in the more recent buyout market, the Jazz did put in calls to try to improve the end of their rotation. Reports indicate they even made a play at Batum. The Shaq Harrison signing didn’t pan out, partially because the Jazz tried to repurpose him as a third-unit point guard when really he’s more of a defensive pest with some spot-shooting and slashing skills on offense. The Ersan Ilyasova pickup didn’t yield what some people had hoped. Acquiring Matt Thomas in a deadline trade was more of a developmental play, adding a player with an NBA skill set that they might be able to develop in the medium term a la Ingles or O’Neale. But those weren’t the only swings the Jazz took.

Now they’ll take some more, either with smart moves around the margins or via a larger reshuffle that involves putting current rotation players on the trade market. It’s how teams with a championship-worthy core improve their chances and give themselves more ways to win a playoff game here or there. 

And it’s the next big set of questions we’ll be attempting to answer here at Salt City Hoops — starting with a piece from Zarin Ficklin tomorrow.