The Utah Jazz have a plan to score without Gordon Hayward
By Jared Dubin
More than anything else, the overriding theme of the first week of the 2017 NBA season was absences. It started the first game of the year — a game during which Gordon Hayward fractured his ankle. The Celtics later learned that his absence would likely last all season. The second game of the season saw Draymond Green absent from the fourth quarter and Andre Iguodala absent entirely, and we soon learned Chris Paul would take an extended absence due to a lingering knee injury.
Kawhi Leonard has been absent from Spurs games. Isaiah Thomas has been absent from Cavs games, and will be for a while. Jeremy Lin will be absent for the rest of the season after another devastating knee injury. Milos Teodosic will be absent for a while after suffering a plantar fascia injury. Eric Bledsoe apparently wants to leave his Suns locker absent, and Earl Watson will be absent from the coach’s office for good.
Most of those absences, though, were unplanned. With the exception of Thomas (the Cavs knew what they were getting when they traded for him), there was really no way any of those players’ teams could have predicted they’d be taking absences this early in the season, and so it will presumably be difficult on at least some level to overcome them. The absences teams can weather more easily are those they have time to prepare for, the ones they build their team around.
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There is perhaps no more absence more palpable this season than that of Gordon Hayward from the Jazz roster. To be sure, Hayward’s absence will be felt strongly in Boston; but we also only got to see the Celtics with Hayward for a few minutes. It’s difficult to be as confident about how his absence will affect them as we can be about how it will affect the Jazz, for whom he was the centrifugal force of the offense over the last several seasons. Now, he’s gone; and even three games into the year, we’re already seeing both the effect of his absence and some of the ways the Jazz will attempt to weather it.
Without Hayward, the Jazz lack a truly elite perimeter scorer, but they do luckily have several players capable of shouldering the playmaking burden, creating looks for themselves and others.
Three games into his Jazz career, Ricky Rubio is fitting in beautifully. He’s tied for the team lead in scoring and recording more than eight assists per game. In particular, he appears to have a mind meld with Joe Ingles, repeatedly spotting Ingles in the opposite corner after coming around a screen on pick-and-rolls. Rubio has long been a player whose offensive impact is contained both within and outside the box score, and that should hold true in Utah as well.
It’s important for the Jazz that Rubio has help, though, because he has clear deficiencies that hampered his teams in Minnesota over the years. His lack of a jump shot is a clear detriment, and there have been times early in the year where playing him with Derrick Favors and Rudy Gobert has led to cramped spacing, particularly in the half-court. It doesn’t help that Favors keeps stationing himself outside the 3-point line, but stepping inside while catching a pass from Rubio.
Teams are already crashing hard onto Gobert’s dives to the rim on pick-and-roll (that’s always been the case, but they’re crashing even harder like they did on Steven Adams after Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City last year), but in an encouraging sign, he’s shown even more deftness catching and then passing on the roll than he did a year ago. The continued development of that skill will be hugely important not only for Gobert to take the next step as a player, but also for the Jazz to maintain a functional offense. Rare is the player that tightly guards Rubio coming around screens, so there will be defenders in Gobert’s face as soon as he catches the ball; he either needs to finish over them or find the next open man as quickly as possible.
Gobert has done well to find that open man, but neither he nor Favors are really what anyone would call playmakers. Utah’s secondary creators — Ingles, Rodney Hood, Joe Johnson, Donovan Mitchell, Alec Burks — have a large burden to shoulder in order to ensure the team can run a fully functional offense.
Staying a step ahead of the defense with pinpoint passing will be the order of the day for the entire season. They’ve done well with it so far, but it’s reasonable to expect some drop-off over the slog of a long season. It’s difficult to do for 48 minutes, let alone the whole year. A lot of trial and error will be required, as different teams will spring leaks in different places. (The Jazz offense was shut down during the first half of their season opener against the Nuggets, for example, but once they cracked Denver’s defense in the third quarter, the floodgates opened and they were able to rain points.) Without a truly elite creator, the Jazz may have to be content varying how they attack their opponents in the half-court on a night-to-night basis.
One thing they’re already doing to goose what is sure to be a comparatively strained half-court attack (they’re throwing 20 more passes per game this year than they did a year ago, per SportVU data on NBA.com, and it’s not just because they feel like it) is making a greater effort to get into the offense earlier in the shot clock. Every team comes into the season saying they want to push the ball up the floor more often and get into their sets quicker, but at least through the early part of the season, the Jazz have noticeably followed through on that desire.
The average Utah possession following a defensive rebound lasted 14.1 seconds last season, the second-highest average in the league, per Inpredictable. They were able to wring 1.08 points per possession (eighth-best in the NBA) out of those plays through sheer talent and a diligent devotion to Quin Snyder’s system, but without Hayward, that number was sure to drop if they kept up the same pace. So this year, they’re pushing. The average Utah possession after a defensive rebound has lasted only 11.9 seconds so far, and the Jazz have accordingly been able to push up to 1.10 points per possession on those plays. They’re still slow as molasses after made baskets, but that’s their game. They’re never going to be a run-and-gun outfit, but targeted transition attacks and a concerted effort to simply get into the flow of the half-court offense sooner can, over the course of a full season, be the difference between a below-average offense and an above-average one.
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This team is going to win games primarily on the strength of its defense, and surely the Jazz are comfortable with that. It’s easy to see them once again ranking among the best defenses in basketball. They still have the best interior defender in the NBA in Gobert, and he affects a far larger area of the floor than just the paint. They also have what should prove to be one of the better defensive units in the league coming off the bench, led by the rookie Mitchell and the inside/outside duo of Ekpe Udoh (and his plus-minus!) and Thabo Sefolosha.
But the Jazz do have to score, and teams with good defenses of their own will make it very difficult when Utah has certain groups out there. How they counter units content to leave non-shooters like Rubio, Favors, Udoh, and Sefolosha open and hell-bent on stopping Gobert at the rim, will go a long way toward determining if this version of the Jazz is a souped-up version of the recent Hornets teams, or something more.