KM32MVP
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https://nba-point-forward.si.com/2010/11/11/jazz-merit-notice-as-potential-top-contender/
Jazz merit notice as potential top contender
Jazz fans are crowing Thursday, and it’s understandable. It’s only mid-November, but the last few days have produced the craziest night of regular-season action (Tuesday, featuring Utah’s rally in Miami and Indiana’s near-perfect third-quarter explosion against Denver) and the best set of back-to-back victories we might see all season. The latter, of course, came courtesy of Utah, which just completed improbable road comebacks against the Heat and Magic.
Utah’s offseason theft of Al Jefferson from Minnesota drew raves, but few league observers considered the Jazz a serious threat to knock off the Lakers in the Western Conference or win the NBA title. And even now, Utah is still “only” 5-3 and in second place in its own division. But after two giant road victories, it’s fair to wonder: Are the Jazz better than we thought?
The Jazz are, fundamentally, the same team they’ve been for a while. They assist on a high percentage of their baskets, they get to the line a lot, they foul a ton on defense and they shoot few three-pointers. Another year, another Jerry Sloan team. But there are some early differences between this Utah team and last season’s, and those differences trend more toward “worrisome” than “encouraging.”
• Rebounding is down. The Jazz rank 20th in offensive rebounding rate and, more alarmingly, 25th in defensive rebounding rate. They finished 13th and fifth, respectively, in those categories last season. One good sign: They’ve already faced five of the top 10 offensive rebounding teams this season, so perhaps the Jazz are better at protecting the defensive glass than the early numbers indicate. If they’re not, they will get themselves in trouble in the long run.
The Paul Millsap-Jefferson combination will end up outscoring the Millsap-Carlos Boozer pairing, but Utah’s top two big men haven’t cleaned the defensive glass during their careers as well as Boozer. Andrei Kirilenko’s rebounding numbers are also down, possibly because he’s almost exclusively guarding small forwards this season.
Teams can succeed by being so-so on the boards at one end, but rarely can they get away with it on both ends. Jazz fans have to hope Utah gets better on the defensive glass.
• Offense has dipped. The Jazz have scored 106.2 points per 100 possessions, 14th in the league. That’s bad for a team that usually wins with very efficient offense; the Jazz scored 110.7 points per 100 possessions last season.
The good news here is that this is almost entirely because of shooting. The Jazz are doing everything else — turning the ball over, getting the line, etc. — at about the same rate as they were last season. Their shooting accuracy has dropped from 49.1 percent to 46.4 percent, and they’re doing worse on mid-range shots and long two-pointers. They’re probably due for a hot streak, and they need to hit those twos, because they’re never going to be an elite three-point shooting team in Sloan’s system.
One note: They seem to be attacking the rim a lot less, as their attempts from the layup range have dropped from 31.3 last season (second in the league, behind Memphis) to 24.4 this season. I’m unsure how big an issue this really is, though. That 24.4 figure still ranks in the top 10, because the league as a whole is attempting far fewer shots at the rim, according to Hoopdata. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a tad suspicious about this league-wide distribution of shot attempts away from the rim, since those attempts appear to have migrated entirely (according to Hoopdata) to the range between the rim and the area 10 feet from the hoop.
Hoopdata depends on play-by-play logs for its shot distance info, and I’m curious as to whether those logs have changed the way they classify shots.
• The defense is surviving because the Jazz have been unusually stingy against the three-pointer. Opponents are shooting just 30.6 percent from deep; only the Hornets and Blazers have held opponents to a lower three-point mark.
The skeptics would say this is luck, and that teams will start hitting more often from deep against the Jazz — and that when they do, Utah’s defense will suffer unless it can improve elsewhere. And don’t bet on that improvement coming in foul rate, since the Jazz are among the most foul-happy teams every year.
But what if the Jazz have recommitted to defending the three-pointer this season? And what if having Kirilenko back healthy helps more than expected in this regard? We saw Wednesday that Utah used a matchup zone – illustrated beautifully with video here — to flummox Orlando, one of the league’s best three-point shooting teams. Maybe this is something the Jazz will break out more often.
Sum all of this up, and I’m not ready to put Utah in the elite yet. There are just too many questions, particularly about the rebounding, and scoring depth will continue to concern me until C.J. Miles proves he can be a consistent threat on the wing and Mehmet Okur comes back healthy to space the floor.
But still: The Jazz have one of the two best point guards in the league, and they’ve proved they can win brutal road games. If they’re not among the top five or six contenders yet — and I don’t think they are — they deserve our attention as a team that could break into that group.
