Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 119-98 win over the Sacramento Kings from Salt Lake Tribune beat writer Andy Larsen.
1. The Kings defense didn’t exactly bring a lot of resistance
We’re to the point of the season that a major factor, maybe the major factor, in some of these games is whether or not the teams that the Jazz play care or not. Tonight, the Jazz faced the Kings on a second night of a back to back, already assured of missing the playoffs, without their starting center, and with their best player De’Aaron Fox earning three fouls in four minutes.
So Donovan Mitchell gets the ball in the corner, pump fakes, and drives baseline. All of a sudden he realizes, “hey, wait, nobody’s preventing me from scoring here, let’s score!" and gets the easy layup.
Next play, the Jazz run Spain pick and roll. Normally, success on this play means a drive or a pass, but watch what Marvin Bagley, No. 35, does on the play. Rudy Gobert sets the screen to force Joe Ingles left — the Jazz always try to get Ingles to go left — but for some reason, Bagley is hanging out on the right side of the screen. What? Why are you doing this? (The answer is that he’s a rookie, and rookies are usually bad at defensive things, but anyway.)
So the Kings call timeout, down 10-0. This is their chance to try to sort out their defense and call their next play. They run pick and pop for Bagley, who sees Rudy Gobert on him and thinks “Now is my time to isolate the defensive player of the year.” A goofy floater and a goofy tip-in attempt followed. Neither were successful.
In Bagley’s defense: this is the time of the year when young promising rookies should just throw stuff against the wall and see if it sticks. Random wild isos against Gobert aren’t going to stick, but hey, maybe he needed to learn that first hand. But in terms of a competitive game, it doesn’t mean much.
2. Rudy Gobert’s interior screens
There’s no chance these are counted in Rudy Gobert’s league-leading screen assist totals, as detailed by ESPN, but I think they matter just as much. With their defense floundering, Dave Joerger tries to switch to a zone defense. So the Jazz do what you do against zones: you swing the ball around the perimeter until you get space to shoot or attack.
But I like what Gobert does next: he prevents Bagley from making the rotation in time to stop Mitchell in the paint with a screen. That means by the time he is able to get around Gobert, Mitchell’s already in the air to make the layup happen. Not everyone would be able to finish around him anyway, but obviously, Donovan Mitchell is very good.
That’s the thing about Gobert: he just does a lot of little things so well. (I know full well that the phrase “little things” makes me sound like a ex-player in the color commentary spot.) There are a lot of shot blockers in this league that are secretly terrible at a lot of these things. Hassan Whiteside loves leaping for blocks he has no chance at, as does Mitchell Robinson. Tons of bigs just love slipping screens, all the better for scoring themselves with.
Gobert wants the recognition, yes, but he wants to win more. So he’ll help Mitchell on this kind of a play, knowing that it will help his team. He’ll tap rebounds out to teammates, knowing he won’t get credited for it. And yeah, he’ll just be there nearly every time defensively when his teammates are counting on him.
He’s just really, really good. I talk about it all the time, and it’s still not nearly enough. He’s the biggest reason why the Jazz are very likely to be a 50-win team this year.
3. Grayson Allen new career-high, and end of rookie year surges
Wait, didn’t he set a career high on Wednesday? Yes, then he scored 14 points, and it was pretty good. But now, he scored 23 points, and it was even better.
Allen went 10-14 from the field in 26:22 on the floor on Friday night to get those 23 points. Yes, he also had six turnovers, also a new career high, so that’s bad. But I’m starting to get a little bit intrigued with the number of different ways he can score the ball.
So there’s the talented finishes in transition where he’s splitting defenders — who, admittedly, don’t do a good job of staying square and making Allen’s job difficult. There’s the stepback three after a closeout, a difficult shot to master. There’s two really tough finishes in traffic, one a wide finish high off the backboard, another a power layup through contact. And there’s the snake pick and roll that we saw in the last game. That’s quite the toolset!
The defense has also improved from horrific to playable, at least against bad teams. That’s a big leap.
And here’s the required caveat: there are a lot of young players who do this at the end of their rookie seasons. Trey Lyles, who has been a non-factor in his fourth year, played very well at the end of the 2015-16 campaign. Trey Burke scored 32 points in the final game of his rookie season, after averaging nearly 16 per game in April. Eric Maynor scored 15 on eight shots, Dee Brown had 13 on seven shots.
There are some positive Jazz examples, though: Gordon Hayward scored 34 points on the final night of his rookie season, wildly improving in the end. So it might yet turn out well for Allen, and we do have to regard this as a positive sign.
