Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 116-103 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.
1. Overwhelming 3-point attack
The Jazz make the second-most threes in the league, the Thunder make the 19th most. So, yeah, you can come into this game, and think: “Hey, the Jazz are going to have a 3-point advantage.” But the Jazz average 14.0 made threes per night, the Thunder 11.7. So even though that’s a pretty sizable gap, usually it’s not game-determining. It’s worth seven points.
Tonight, the Jazz made 23 threes, the Thunder made eight. That’s 45 points of a difference. That’s enough to determine the winner essentially every contest, even if other stuff goes against you.
So what happened? Well, essentially, the Thunder — missing eight players — stayed in their main defense, which involves significant weak-side help, all night long. As Trent Forrest explained, ”The whole team was kind of coming into the paint (on drives). You could throw it anywhere and have an open three.”
Even better, Donovan Mitchell is one of the league’s best kickout passers. It all just means open three after open three.
Bojan Bogdanovic was the key beneficiary of this, with 11 threes — a Jazz record. And of course, in order to make 11 threes, he had to be able to take 18 threes. Bogdanovic isn’t like Steph Curry who can generate their own threes on the ball reliably. He’s more like Klay Thompson, who gets threes thanks to his quick off-ball movement and high, accurate release.
Does more experienced opposition defend that better? Of course. But give Bogdanovic credit for being able to do it not just a few times but 18 times, and, you know, make 11 of them. It was enough to give the Jazz a win in an otherwise average performance.
2. Good Royce, bad Royce
I loved something Royce O’Neale did tonight: he was extremely aggressive in taking the 3-point shots that he got, even those early in the clock. Look at this! I don’t recognize this man!
O’Neale is a 42% 3-point shooter this year — if they leave you open, even if it’s a couple feet beyond the arc, take it. The Jazz are unlikely to get a better shot in any given possession than O’Neale taking an open look. They give you an average of 1.2 points in half court, you take it.
It turns out that this was a focus of Quin Snyder’s pregame address to the team. After noticing that the Jazz passed up open shots against the Pelicans to drive into traffic, he wanted his team to take the first good shot they had against the Thunder — they did, and you saw the results.
So that’s the good news.
The bad news is that, again, O’Neale showed a tendency to just get blown by, in the way that completely breaks the Jazz’s defense. Jazz fans would make fun of James Harden for this defense, right? I mean, Rudy Gobert can come over and try to help, but when it’s so effortless, he doesn’t have a prayer.
On one hand, that’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, one of the super promising up-and-coming guards of our league. But O’Neale’s going to be asked to guard even better, quicker players in the playoffs, and he’ll need to raise his level or get subbed out.
It’s much easier to stay in front of Aleksej Pokusevski... and, well, it happened inconsistently.
I get it — you have a big lead against the Thunder, and it’s probably a 99% chance at a win. It’s not the playoffs. But it would have been nice to shut them down early, and some stops or more effort on possessions like this would have helped.
3. Jazz and Mavs seed probabilities
Current Jazz seed probabilities, from Inpredictable:
2nd: 5%
3rd: 20%
4th: 64%
5th: 9%
6th: 1%
So, quite likely that the Jazz end up as the 4th seed. But I still think it would benefit the Jazz greatly to fight for that third seed — avoiding facing the Phoenix Suns in the second round would be very, very nice. Both teams know well that it can be hard to keep a healthy backcourt through multiple playoff rounds, and the Jazz’s best chance is probably if something were to happen to Phoenix.
Plus, getting to the Western Conference Finals represents progress. They can sell that to Donovan, Rudy, and any free agents who might be interested in the mid-level exception.
Relatedly, here’s Dallas’ seed probabilities:
3rd: 2%
4th: 9%
5th: 58%
6th: 22%
7th: 9%
The Jazz potentially getting a win tomorrow and locking down the tiebreaker against Dallas would mold those odds a bit, but I also think it’s a potentially interesting game stylistically. Dallas’ offense went kaput as they tried the Luka Doncic vs. Rudy Gobert matchup over and over again in their last game — are they going to go to that well again, or change it up to see what else might work? If I were Mavs coach Jason Kidd, I would do the latter, but I am not Jason Kidd in so, so many different ways.
Still, it’s a matchup I’m very interested to see, and you get the feeling the Jazz are too. They could have rested Mike Conley tomorrow night, but they wanted their full squad available for the Mavs. It’s a tough situation, being at the end of a long road trip and on the second end of a back-to-back, but I think it’s a winnable game for the Jazz anyway if they play at their best.
