Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 122-113 win over the Houston Rockets from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.
1. Overcoming patches of bad play
Look, we all know that this season is going to have significant stretches in which the Jazz struggle. In the Jazz’s first nine minutes of this game, they scored a grand total of four points. The truth of the play was probably even more ugly than that.
It would be very easy for this team in general to respond poorly when that adversity and 18-4 scoreline hits. They’re expected to get blown out by the better teams in the NBA — they could just give up. Negative frustration would also be understandable, either within each player or even in between teammates.
Tonight, they didn’t. They fought through the rough patch, and started to play better defense, get into a bit of a rhythm, run in transition, and made their way back into the game. In the end, it wasn’t a close contest the other way: the Jazz had picked up a win.
Of course there are caveats: the Rockets weren’t playing all of their players, they began playing bench guys late in the second half, and it’s preseason when nothing matters.
But I think there’s a world in which this is a completely lost season: where the Jazz not only are an awful basketball team but learn nothing from the experience. Continuing to fight in bleak situations makes learning more possible, I think.
“With a lot of new guys, some guys going into their second year, we’re trying to build that cohesion mentally,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “It’ll be some ups and downs along the way, but I thought tonight was a good moment for them to take the message, talk it out themselves, and then go execute.”
2. Rebounding among the young guys
Cody Williams played more than any other player on the floor tonight, 26:51 overall. He gathered one rebound. Taylor Hendricks started and played 23:04, and gathered three rebounds. Brice Sensabaugh played 19:37, and gathered seven rebounds. I don’t want to make too much of rebounding box score numbers in one game — it’s so, so random where balls bounce on any given night.
But I do want to highlight Sensabaugh’s approach as being especially promising. Tonight, I thought he legitimately attacked the glass, getting some rebounds in deep position down low against some players who love getting offensive putbacks, like Alperen Sengun and Steven Adams.
Before the game, he talked about that ball-hawk approach as something he wanted to focus on this year, wanting to “touch the ball as much as possible,” as he put it, on both ends of the floor. That, to him, meant rebounds, steals, and assists, not necessarily scoring.
I do think Williams and Hendricks could benefit from that same attitude at times, as they can tend to float in and out of games. Tonight, much of the discussion online was about Sensabaugh, and that was because he found a way to get involved throughout.
3. Johnny Juzang, interesting player?
Johnny Juzang wasn’t just a 3-point shooter in college, but a dynamic all-around scorer. Hardy said he was the reason behind Juzang’s game change.
“He and I had a very pointed discussion about how I viewed him making it in the NBA, and what I thought that his pathway could be, and he’s worked really hard at it,” Hardy said. What was that vision?
“I told Johnny that I thought that because of his shooting ability, because of his conditioning, that him making it as a 3-point threat was going to be his pathway. 6-foot-5, 6-foot-6, kind of do-everything guys are sort of dime a dozen; doesn’t mean that you can’t be a great player. But with the position that Johnny was in on our roster coming into the NBA, he needed to distinguish himself. He needed to give himself sort of a different look than some of the other players.”
Juzang’s done that: he’s remolded his game to become a shooter first and foremost.
Recency bias is real. So is small sample size theater. But also, Johnny Juzang has made eight of his last 10 threes, so is he the best shooter in the NBA?
This is the tough thing about evaluating players who primarily contribute by shooting the ball from deep — the difference between a 33% shooter and a 38% shooter is only one more made shot every 20 shots. As a result, you’d really prefer to have 750 shots to establish a strong enough sample size about whether or not a player is good at shooting. Only one player shot that many threes last season: Steph Curry.
In his whole recorded basketball career, Johnny Juzang has shot 1,015 threes. (He’s taken 140 in the NBA regular season, 64 in the NBA summer league, 18 in the NBA preseason, 332 threes in the G-League regular season action, 127 in the G-League showcase, 10 in the G-League playoffs, and 324 in NCAA play.) He’s made 37.3% of them. That’s pretty good!
Of course, it is also possible, maybe even likely, that Juzang has improved as a shooter thanks to practice. I watch him warm up quite a lot, and visually, he is an excellent shooter: he makes an extremely high rate of them compared to the other young members of the Jazz. (Markkanen is definitely the Jazz’s best shooter, to nobody’s surprise.)
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