Who’s Going Home? Jazz, Nuggets Brace for Game 7

These two have had special postseasons, but one of them is about to be done for the year.

No matter what happens on Tuesday night, a blazing hot guard and an All-NBA center will be leaving the NBA’s bubble on Wednesday morning.

The top two scorers in this season’s NBA playoffs — Utah’s Donovan Mitchell (38.7 points per game) and Denver’s Jamal Murray (34.0) — will face off one more time, with the winner taking his team to a second-round matchup with the L.A. Clippers. The brilliance of those two has somehow overshadowed the titanic showdown between two of the game’s best centers, as the dynamic scoring guards have rewritten history with their unbelievable postseason surges. But after this tenth battle between the 2019-20 Nuggets and Jazz, someone’s season will be over.

 Mitchell and Murray have each scored 50 or more in two separate games in this series, making them two of the four players to achieve such a feat in NBA playoff history, and the only opponent pair to ever hit 50-plus in the same game. Both are threatening to shatter the record for the most points ever in a first-round series. With one big shot after another, these two have forced their teams to a draw: it’s all tied up, 3-3, as we head into the decider.

Both teams have found success — and failure — different ways throughout the series. No two playoff games are exactly alike, as player performances vary, strategies shift and pressure changes throughout the series. The pressure cooker of a Game 7 alone could do weird things to a particular player’s psychology, in either direction.

That said, there are a few common denominators in the six playoff meetings so far that should probably serve as the bellwethers for which team gets to continue its season at Disney’s Wide World of Sports. With that in mind, let’s look at what each team needs to focus on to avoid having its bubble burst.

The Jazz will go home if…

…they can’t slow Murray without letting other Nuggets go off. The Jazz came into this series with a sound, data-driven approach to guarding Murray and his pick-and-roll partner, all-league big man Nikola Jokic. Those two are skilled, multi-level threats in the P&R game, capable of bending defenses and generating good looks for everybody. They also have great vision; Jokic is probably a top-3 passing big man ever, and Murray is great at recognizing coverages. Overcommit to stopping their multifaceted 2-man attack, and they’ll get the ball to someone who can punish you for flinching.

So Utah has decided to do something a bit radical: they’re mostly guarding the Murray-Jokic action in the middle of the floor 2-on-2. They’ve occasionally brought in a wing defender to stunt Murray, and in rare cases the corner defender has had to pull in to get in Jokic’s way down low. But for the most part, they have been trying to control those two without setting the table for Denver’s role players. And for a couple of games, it worked. They stymied Murray into subpar shooting games in G2 and G3, and did so without letting the Nuggets’ capable spot-up shooters get hot. 

Since then, it’s been a different story.

Murray exploded for 50 in Game 4, and Utah only escaped with the narrow win because Mitchell was every bit as brilliant. The Denver guard kept it going with 42 and 50 in the next two games, this time with more help from Jokic, who had his best scoring game in G5 and a series-high nine assists in G6. In other words, the strategy of guarding Murray and Jokic straight up is starting to crack, but Utah mostly hasn’t budged.

Jazz coach Quin Snyder has a tough decision to make heading into this deciding game. He can trust the defensive philosophy he brought into this series, and the analytics that informed it. Or he can throw extra help at the red-hot Murray, but risk creating cracks in the armor elsewhere by doing so.

At the very end of G6, we saw him experiment a little with the latter option. He switched Royce O’Neale — who has primarily checked Murray since G2 — onto Jokic so that on pick-and-rolls involving the pair, O’Neale was there to trap hard and get the ball out of Murray’s hands. That meant Rudy Gobert was not directly guarding the P&R, but they parked him on Torrey Craig, someone who doesn’t need constant defensive attention. The idea there is that Gobert would be available to help on Jokic’s rolls to the basket while O’Neale and Jordan Clarkson were trapping Murray. Of course, that would leave Craig open, but the Jazz were playing the numbers at that point, calculating that an unguarded Craig would do less damage than a flaming-hot Murray.

Problem is, the execution was poor. Like… really poor. O’Neale constantly got hung up while battling with Jokic, so he wasn’t there to actually execute the trap. (Some examples in this thread.) Clarkson, who is a minus defender anyway, was unsure how to proceed since the trap wasn’t there, so Murray and others just danced right through this poorly executed attempt at switching the defense up.

They can try to employ something like in G7, but just be better at it. They can stick to their default defense and hope that the law of averages pulls Murray back to earth. They can cross-match, switch, show harder, bring help or try any number of wrinkles. They can switch up personnel. But everything they try has a cost. And if they give up too much tonight — to Murray, to Jokic, or to the supporting cast — they’re done.

…Mike Conley, Joe Ingles and O’Neale miss their open threes. So far in this series, the Jazz have needed 6o.9% effectively field goal shooting or better to win. The three games they shot between 56.2% and 60.3%, they lost. The three games they shot between 60.9% and 73.2%, they won. As we just discussed, Utah will try to tighten up the defense so that they don’t have to focus only on outscoring the torrid Nuggets. But at the end of the day, playoff basketball is as much about shot-making as it is about anything else. 

Ingles has had a paritcularly up-and-down series. He started the series with 37 points in the first two games, and 43% shooting from three, but has wound up in single digits in three of the last four. His reluctance to shoot open ones has hurt the Jazz’s offense at times, and he hasn’t quite been himself defensively, either. 

O’Neale has shot fine on a small number of attempts in this series (50% from deep), and Conley has been remarkably consistent after missing the first two games to greet his newest son Elijah. The veteran guard is averaging better than 60% from three in this series, and putting up 22.8 points per game. He needs to have the ball in his hands a lot in Game 7, particularly when the reserve unit is in or when the defense is loading up on Mitchell.

…they don’t get better performances from a bench player or two. Game 6 was rough from a bench perspective. Utah actually won that game by 14 in their starter-only minutes, but were an astonishing minus-26 any time they had even a single reserve on the court.

They were at their worst with 2- and 3-reserve lineups, groups that lost by roughly a point per minute despite the presence of 2-3 starters.

Clarkson had his worst game of the playoffs so far, and the Jazz defense just bled points with Georges Niang on the court (146 DRtg). Tony Bradley was bad enough in limited minutes that Snyder opted to try Juwan Morgan at center for a brief spurt. Murray relentlessly targeted the rookie, scoring seven points in just over a minute and forcing Morgan off the floor.

Someone on Utah’s bench is going to have to play better on Tuesday night. Denver’s bench was already a huge advantage for them, and the return of Gary Harris provides the Nuggets with another dollup of scoring and defense. The Jazz will likely tighten the rotation some in a win-or-go-home affair, but they have to get more from that group, or they’ll be clearing out their hotel rooms at the Grand Floridian.

The Nuggets will go home if…

…they revert back to their G1-G4 defense. Utah scored 123 points per 100 halfcourt possessions in the first four games of the series, a downright ridiculous number. Even for the series as a whole, Utah’s production in a halfcourt setting (116.4) is nearly 16 points better than the top offense in the regular season (Dallas’ 100.9).

But, the Nuggets have been far better on the defensive end in Games 5 and 6. The Jazz’s overall offensive numbers have been far closer to average in those games, and in particular they kept Jazz out of the lane more often. With a combination of more aggressive defensive tactics — some switching, some trapping, some high hedging and showing at the level of the pick — they have taken some juice out of the Utah offense. More Jazz plays are hitting a dead end, which results in a short-clock reset and a bunch of isolation play. 

Jokic has gotten better at more aggressive P&R coverages, and he’s probably underrated on switches, too. Torrey Craig is a nice perimeter stopper, and Jerami Grant has been able to bother some of Utah’s guards with his length, at least on and off.

But make no mistake about it: if Utah hadn’t shot just 10-for-21 at the rim in Game 6 — their third worst output of 2020 — that would have been a very different contest coming down the stretch. That is pretty damn anomalous, and if Denver can’t replicate some portion of that magic, Game 7 will likely go down to the wire.  

And speaking of rim finishing, the Nuggets are hoping they can keep Gobert relatively quiet, which brings us to the next “Denver loses if…” point.

…they don’t turn the Jazz over. Much has been made of Denver’s offensive rebounding, but that hasn’t really been the key most people thought it would The Nuggets have actually lost the three games where they had the highest OReb%, perhaps because the Jazz got out in transition (in two of those three games at least). Pursuing offensive boards often means you’re leaving the other basket unattended, which is why the Jazz don’t bother much with chasing their own misses.

Instead, it’s a different one of the “four factors” that has correlated more directly with Denver winning or losing: they need to force Jazz mistakes.

In three Utah wins, Denver’s defensive TO% has been extremely low — 9.6% on average. In the three Denver wins, they’ve made Utah cough up the ball on 16.1%, 15.4% and 11% of their possessions. For a team that has struggled defensively, this is one way to sap efficiency from their opponent. The Jazz have the best eFG% in the playoffs at 62.3%, which is why a big key for Denver has been keeping them from the shot by forcing giveaways.

…they let Gobert get on top of the rim. Through four games, the first-time All-Star was averaging 19.3 points on a ridiculous 75% from the field. Since then, he has notched a couple of 11-point outings on 41% combined shooting.

Some of the drop-off is due to softer finishes and fewer offensive rebound opportunities for the big fella. But Denver has impacted Gobert, too. Jokic is getting back to Gobert quicker, often backing his derrier right into the Frenchman to make the pocket pass difficult or impossible. When Jokic is occupied on the ball, athletic helpers are swarming in from the corners. In G6, even Miles Plumlee and Michael Porter Jr. did a good job of challenging him inside, which bought Jokic an extra couple minutes of rest. 

Gobert showing out like the All-Star and DPOY finalist he is would make Game 7 extremely difficult for the Nuggets. 

Whoever wins, Tuesday brings the end of what has been a wildly entertaining series, and the coming out party for two electric scoring guards. One of them will get to continue writing his story. We’ll find out which one in a few hours.