Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 134-124 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers from Salt Lake Tribune beat writer Andy Larsen.
1. Damian Lillard 60-point night
At a certain point, it’s just revealing if you allow a player to have the most efficient 60 point game of all time.
Yes, that’s what Damian Lillard’s game was. He scored 60 points, shooting 21-29 from the field and a whopping 9-15 from the 3-point line.
Watch this highlight reel, and think about what the Jazz could have done at a higher level — and think about the personnel that could have helped.
• That first play of the reel — what in the world is Malik Beasley doing in transition? He’s just kind of aimlessly dropping into the paint, when we all know that Lauri Markkanen can handle Josh Hart in transition. Guard someone else.
• At the 1 minute mark: Walker Kessler showing his weakness — getting up in pick and roll. It was a key focus of the Kyrie Irving game, and the Jazz simply need him to show higher on those plays. This is Damian Lillard, he’s going to take pull-up threes, and Kessler can’t be 10 feet away from him. (Kessler simply isn’t ready at the 1:30 mark and gets beaten, too.)
• Jarred Vanderbilt just isn’t much of an impactful defender, either in help defense or one-on-one. At 1:45, he comes over too late, even though he has to be aware of Lillard in that situation. At 1:50, he gets step-backed. At 2:12, he gets blown by for a layup. This simply can’t be your best perimeter defender if you’re a contending team.
There are other plays, of course, but the truth is that the Conley/Clarkson/Sexton backcourt trio isn’t able to make much of an impact on star guards defensively, whether it’s 48 points from Kyrie Irving or 60 points from Damian Lillard. That has to be Danny Ainge’s priority when it comes to finding the next pieces of this team: find complementary guards that can defend the league’s best.
To be sure, at some point you have to tip your cap, and Lillard was sensational tonight. But good defenders would have limited it more, and the Jazz have lacked that for multiple seasons now.
2. Lauri Markkanen, getting too close
But I want to zoom in one piece of the Jazz’s core for closer defensive inspection: Lauri Markkanen.
What Markkanen has done this season has been truly awesome, and even in defeat, he had another very solid game tonight: 24 points on 7-16 shooting, 0 turnovers? Great. He was not the problem.
But he is the biggest definite long-term building block of this Jazz franchise. And so his skillset, his strengths and his weaknesses, simply matters more than everyone else’s — in short, it could define whether or not the Jazz win in a playoff series down the road.
And so I have to note that he’s shown some defensive weaknesses he has to clean up.
Take the defense at the 1:15 mark of the highlight reel above. Markkanen simply looks as flat-footed as can possibly be. Or at 1:45, Markkanen gets toasted with a relatively simple crossover. The defense at 2:57 is better, but he still gets bested even as he’s at the point of the double-team.
At the very highest level, Markkanen will have to do more in these situations, or teams will exploit him. They’ll bring him up into the defensive play and force a switch, and have a fast guard cook him.
In general, Hardy’s said that Markkanen will sometimes play too close to the opposition when defending them on the perimeter. And I understand why he did that tonight — Lillard is famously an out-of-this-world shooter! He has to be relatively close. But whatever Markkanen’s strategy, even if it involves fouling, he simply can’t let players drive by him as quickly as they did tonight.
This doesn’t make Markkanen a bad defender. I think he’s shown enough in help situations, especially, to be considered an above-average one. He’s also much better against wings, rather than the best guards in the league. But in the end, the containment factor, even on the league’s best guards, just has to be better.
3. Cory Jez and Trail Blazers broadcasts
Look, I’m extremely biased in this situation.
I’m an analytics geek, a math major. I think it’s extremely interesting how the NBA (and heck, all of sports) has changed as a result of the statistical revolution. Moneyball was a magnum opus.
But even when I take those biases into account, I think it’s pretty neat what Portland has done with Cory Jez. Jez was the Jazz’s director of basketball analytics from 2017-2020, before he went to MLS’s Austin FC for a similar job.
Now, the Blazers have him on as the “NBA’s first full-time on-air statistical analyst” — essentially, he chimes in like a sideline reporter, adding color and commentary about something the Blazers are doing well or poorly statistically that’s impacting the score of the game.
Having watched a number of Blazers games this season, sometimes those stats are relatively obvious. Sometimes, he’s answering a question posed to him by the team’s play-by-play (Kevin Calabro) or color commentator (Lamar Hurd). A lot of the time, though, he’s presenting new, interesting, and timely data that should interest fans in the here and now — I consider it to be more insightful and objective than a lot of other third-person-in-booth situations. (They do still have a traditional sideline reporter, by the way: Brooke Olzendam.)
In general, actually, I think it’s pretty interesting what the Blazers have done with their broadcasts. Calabro is terrific, a big name for them to get who first became famous with the Seattle Supersonics. Hurd worked his way up as a college basketball analyst first, and gets terrific reviews from Blazer fans. They hired SportsCenter’s Neil Everett to host many of their pregame, halftime, and postgame shows.
To be clear, I don’t mean this section to be a slight to anyone on Jazz broadcasts. But I appreciate that Portland has gone out and tried creative ways to add to their broadcast like Jez, and I think they’ve done a good job in doing so. I hope that, under the Jazz’s new TV deal, they’re able to do the same.
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