You did not see Kanter posting up on the left block and bumping twice with his right shoulder, off a dribble, before spinning into the middle of the lane (left shoulder) for his shot? He did it several times, with very low success, and added his up and under as a compliment to this primary move. In the past he has been doing the up and under as his go to move and he's looked awful doing so. It's nice to see he is willing to and potentially capable of adding new post moves to his bag of tricks.
He's trying to go middle, which is something many below-the-rim players, Jefferson included, struggle with. In the past (last season and this preseason), he went soft middle, then spun baseline, fooling fewer and fewer defenders. One big problem (very nicely talked about by Chuck and Shaq on TNT last year) with how he executed was how deep he was posting up. He was trapping himself too deep under the basket when he spun baseline as a result. He's still posting too deep too often, but there is improvement. He needs to look to Marc Gasol and Pek as examples of below-the-rim players who go middle effectively with a hook shot. He's broad enough and has soft enough hands that he should be able to develop a good enough hook shot to make both his baseline spin and up-and-under more effective.
As far as passes go, I didn't see anything that added to the offense. Maybe he passed out when he had a very low percentage shot but so what?
He's hit Foye a couple times up top for open 3-pt attempts. Nothing fantastic, admittedly, but it's the same pass that Jefferson needed nearly a decade to figure out. When he passes, though, he does so much more crisply than Jefferson. I mostly point this out as an indicator of progress (we've seen more passes as the preseason has progressed, even).
As far as drawing defenders go, I saw the Clippers defense giving the Jazz offense the same things the Spurs did last post season. For some reason, the Jazz get into this awful habit of running the post game with everyone on the other side of the floor which leaves 4 guys guardable by two defenders. It's like sticking everyone into a corner and having one guy to block passes from coming through the doorway.
It is infuriating. This is one area where billyshelby's analysis would (or at least could) be instructive.
As far as getting to the line goes, cool. 21 times in 5 games averaging 21 MPG. That's bad ***. I don't know what it means since he's going against a lot of pre-season scrubs, but I like the continuation of what he showed he could do last season. He has 62 points on 54(?) shots. Is that good or bad?
TS% of .582, with most of his points posting up in the halfcourt, is pretty ****ing fantastic (relatively low turnovers as well). Preseason scrubs, notwithstanding.
What makes this discussion difficult is the dearth of cheap, available, albeit relatively simple statistics about league-wide relative efficiency of different shot types (including halfcourt v. fastbreak). How often do offenses break down? How effective is back-to-the-basket iso scoring relative to dribble penetration? What is league-wide halfcourt scoring efficiency? It's extremely difficult to make a strong argument about the value Jefferson adds with his consistent offensive output in situations of low point expectancy without this data (it's being collected, just not being made freely available AFAIK).
At one extreme we have billyshelby, who seems to think that the only thing that matters is consistent scoring from the low post (ridiculously calling Jefferson "dynamic" because he has both an up-and-under move and a push shot). At the other extreme we have nerd, who thinks teams can execute to get put-backs and fastbreak points on every possession. This discussion will get a lot more interesting as the data becomes available.