Jazz can’t outrun the perception that they play slow, but they are disproving it

There’s no getting around it — the Jazz are slow. Everyone knows this. It takes them longer to get through a play than it takes a high school student to read “War and Peace.” Their “fast-break” opportunities are about as speedy as a snail trudging through peanut butter.

Maybe it’s because they intentionally limit possessions, enticed to do so because of their defensive-centric nature and/or their relative lack of offensive creators. Maybe, as Derrick Favors suggested, “A lot teams think we’re a slow-paced team, probably, because we play with two bigs.”

Whatever the reason, the Jazz are allegedly as quick as your granny in her giant Cadillac with the blinker on.

That’s the perception, anyway.

The reality, meanwhile, shows that (going into Tuesday’s slate of games) the Jazz are actually in the top half of the league in pace, which measures a team’s possessions per game. Apparently, though, some people have been as slow to grasp onto this concept as a tortoise crossing a six-lane highway.

The Jazz rank 14th in the NBA in pace, at 100.65 possessions per game. For some context, that’s 1.21 possessions fewer than the 10th-place, offensive-juggernaut Golden State Warriors. Utah also sits one spot ahead of the offensively-lauded Toronto Raptors. Coach Quin Snyder said there hasn’t been an increased focus on pace “for it’s own sake,” but that it can be a means to an end.

“We want play the way that we can maximize who we are,” he said. “… We want to work on not [merely] playing fast, but playing efficiently in transition to generate open shots. And if that means the ball’s moving up court faster, that’s a good thing.”

To be fair, there are some perfectly valid reasons to explain why the Jazz have the reputation of being as exciting as watching paint dry.

For starters, they’re 29th in the NBA in field-goal attempts per game, averaging more than only the Memphis Grizzlies. Part of the reason for this, however, is that their offense, to some degree, is predicated upon taking riskier chances with its passing, and so they commit the fifth-most turnovers of any team.

Also fueling the argument is that the Jazz are second-to-last in fast-break points as a percentage of overall scoring (their 8.9-percent mark is better only than the Pistons). This, though, ignores that the team is one of the league leaders in assist percentage (fourth), as well as in percentage of points via free throws (sixth) and 3-pointers (10th), and that they’re in the top half of the teams in percentage of points coming in the paint and off of turnovers (both 14th).

Donovan Mitchell said that even if the team isn’t scoring a ton of fast-break points, they believe in their ability to make such opportunities work.

“The biggest thing for us is we came into this season and we felt like we had that advantage if we started running. … We’ve done a great job in practice of really honing that in and hammering the nail as far as getting up and down in transition,” he said. “That’s something that you can’t really scout and can’t really teach.”

Favors agreed.

“We just get out and run. We get up shots, pass the ball a lot, get offensive rebounds. We’re not a slow-paced team like everybody thinks we are,” he said. “We’re pretty fast. We get out and run, and it works out for us.”

While the Jazz are just 20th this season in ppg (110.1), they’ve actually been improving.

They’re up to 11th in the NBA in team ppg since the new year (114.5), and all the way up second in the month of February (121.0) — buoyed, in part, by scoring 129 in regulation vs. OKC (and 147 overall in the double-overtime affair), followed up by 125 more the following night against the Mavericks.

Snyder wasn’t certain there was an exact cause-and-effect behind that, but said they would do what they could to ride it out and make it last.

“The season has ebbs and flows. We’ll keep trying to help our guys be in positions where they can be better,” said Snyder. “You have ideas on the front end of the season of how you want your team to play and grow, and sometimes you adjust and change those things, and we’ve made some adjustments, but nothing dramatic. If we can squeeze a little more out of it, we’ll try to.”