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The Utah Jazz are playing like a monster. They have won eight straight games and have a better record (12-4) than any team that doesn’t play in Los Angeles. Utah’s offensive rating (111.6, according to Cleaning The Glass, which filters trash time and jerks) ranks fourth in the league, and its defensive rating (105.8, according to CTG) and net rating (plus 10.8) rank the second place.
The Jazz have a couple of All-Stars, but even their die-hard fans would admit that Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert don’t have the superstar prestige of LeBron James and Anthony Davis or Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. How exactly are they doing this?
One reason: their players have been available. Utah is the only NBA team that has used the same starting lineup in every game. Of his top nine players, only Joe Ingles, who missed four games with a sore right Achilles, has ever missed. Second-year Juwan Morgan is the only Jazz player who has had to sit out due to health and safety protocols. While this season has been chaotic and unpredictable, with many teams playing understaffed, Utah has had a totally different experience.
Even relatively fortunate teams have had challenges that the Jazz have avoided. Limited practice time has made it difficult for competitors to develop chemistry, but their only “new” rotation player is Derrick Favors, who spent eight and a half seasons with the franchise before a yearlong stay in New Orleans. “They’re where we were three or four years ago,” Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr said Saturday, adding that “continuity is immediately apparent, everyone knows each other so well, they do their thing wonderfully.”
If you loved the Warriors early in your career, you should look at Utah. In the opening possession that night, the five Jazz players touched the ball:
This is exactly what Kerr was talking about. Mitchell sets up a phantom screen for Mike Conley, who passes it to Bojan Bogdanovic, exits a double screen and executes an empty side pick-and-roll. Gobert’s shot sucks on defense and a perfect touch pass from Bogdanovic leaves Royce O’Neale wide open in the corner for the first of 20 3s Utah would make in their 127-108 victory. (The final score didn’t do the beating justice – the Jazz led 77-47 at halftime and by 40 points early in the fourth quarter.)
That fixed game is quintessential Quin Snyder. In late 2017, ESPN’s Zach Lowe wrote about Utah’s “lead basketball,” which he described as a “buzzing, euro-infused system of screens, cuts and drives.” Back then, though the Jazz were starting Ricky Rubio alongside Favors and Gobert. Mitchell and O’Neale were rookies. They knew they weren’t going to have pristine space, especially after Gordon Hayward left, but the system allowed them to outperform an offense average in the regular season.
Following back-to-back five-game series losses to Houston in the playoffs, Utah traded for Conley, signed Bogdanovic and let Favors walk in an effort to fix his spacing problem and over-reliance on Mitchell. Last season was weird and uneven, even before it came to a halt, Bogdanovic underwent wrist surgery and they went without him to the bubble, where Conley’s last 3 seconds ended in the seventh game of the first round. What we’re seeing now is what Utah envisioned in the summer of 2019: “lead basketball” with four shooters, multiple playmakers, and a center running hoop on the court at all times.
Kerr noted that this season’s Jazz are “hitting 3s faster and more often.” The numbers are ridiculous: 44.5 percent of their shots, the highest in the league, come from a 3-point range, according to CTG, and they have hit 41 percent of them, which is second only to the Clippers. . Utah is making 16.8 3s per game, the most in NBA history. In this winning streak, he has averaged 19.3 per game and shot 43.7 percent from deep.
Conley, Mitchell, O’Neale, Ingles and Jordan Clarkson are shooting better than 41 percent in catch-and-shoot 3s on the season. Bogdanovic and Georges Niang have joined that club on this streak. Sometimes it seems like anything Utah throws will fall through the net.
But any team can increase their rate by 3 points if they are determined to do so. The Chicago Bulls did that last season and their offense was horrendous. Snyder has repeatedly said that the Jazz are not thinking about the volume of 3s they are taking or making. They are focused on their space and their passing, and they believe that they will look good if they play their way. This started in the bubble: without Bogdanovic, the coaching staff encouraged the remaining shooters to let him fly without hesitation, and now they have raced with him, in a literal sense.
Utah is only 23rd in pace, but that statistic is misleading. The Jazz are first by a mile in transition scoring, according to CTG, and they get the vast majority of their transition points from live rebounds.
If he misses a layup against Utah, chances are he’s about to give up a 3:
If you break the tables and are unsuccessful, it is very likely that you are about to give up a 3:
And if he makes a wrong move 75 feet from the basket, he is very likely about to give up a 3:
This is a different kind of “advantage basketball.” The Jazz are attacking before the defense is established, and even if they can’t find an open gaze right away, the pace is working in their favor. Here, they push the ball after a basket made against a young New Orleans Pelicans lineup, and two sophomores end up crossing their cables, simultaneously converging on English in the corner:
During the streak, the Jazz have also been incredible in the half court, scoring 105.2 points per 100 possessions. (For context, the Clippers have scored 104 percent, the best in the league this season.) It started with a 131-118 win against the Bucks, in which Utah went 25-for-53 from deep, taking advantage of a defense designed to protect the paint. Milwaukee had the best defensive rating in the league in 2018-19 and 2019-20 despite giving up a ton of 3s, and this year’s Pelicans embraced their philosophy. In two games against New Orleans last week, the Jazz shot a combined 38 of 86 from deep and had an offensive rating of 122.3.
Conley has taken 3.9 3-pointers per game and hit 38.7 percent of them. Mitchell started slowly but has been on fire lately, going 14-of-30 in 3s pull-ups while Utah has been on a roll. When they see fall coverage against a ball screen, they are not shy.
The Jazz burn teams that sink against screens without the ball in the same way:
One way to break a zone: Stand several feet behind the goal so that a close requires the defender to cover more ground.
This also works against cheating:
Everyone knows that Ingles has excellent court vision, and he probably knows that Conley is more comfortable on offense than he was at the beginning of last season. However, the Jazz are clicking, because the whole team is in rhythm and going well. Mitchell has made great strides when it comes to creating games for others:
O’Neale has a usage rate of 8.6 percent, the lowest of his career, but he occasionally makes plays like this:
Utah is tight-fisted on defense and dominant on offense, as it has been since Gobert became its starting center six years. His midfield offense is a barrage of ball movement and player movement, as it has been since Snyder coached his first game a few months earlier. The Jazz are still the Jazz, but they are supercharged. Before his team was wiped out, Kerr said they are capable of winning the title.
To do that, Utah will first have to get in the way of an LA-versus-LA conference final, as Denver did last season. He’ll have to show that his offense can stand up to the elite playoff defense, particularly when opponents are turning everything around in an effort to shut down all the pretty stuff.
If there is a reason for mild skepticism, it is a wild variation. Conley, Mitchell, O’Neale, Ingles and Clarkson are shooting more 3s than ever, and all but Ingles are hitting a higher percentage of them in their career. (English has shot twice better than his 42.6 percent mark in one season, but his 66.5 percent actual shooting is a new high water mark in overall efficiency.) Meanwhile, opponents can do nothing: Against the Jazz, teams are shooting 35.1 percent on open 3s, defined by NBA.com as 3-pointers in which the closest defender is six feet or more away. That’s the fourth-worst mark in the league and it’s been even worse (29.5 percent!) During the streak.
In this regard, Utah has had a bit of luck. But he has a net rating of plus-22.8 in this eight-game streak, according to CTG, and seven of those wins were by double digits. A week before the race began in Milwaukee, Mitchell and Bogdanovic fired a combined 3 of 14 from deep against the Clippers. Previous iterations of the Jazz weren’t equipped to get through a bad Mitchell night against an elite team, but this time they scored a 106-100 win. Conley scored 33 points and made seven triples.
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