Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 124-118 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.
1. Dalton Knecht threes, and the Jazz’s defensive urgency problem
Dalton Knecht scored 37 points tonight, including 9-12 from the 3-point line. The worst part of the game came at the end of the third quarter, when Knecht made four straight threes, then got fouled on the next one, then made the next one. He scored 18 points in a 3-minute and 3-second span.
“In the second half, it seemed like everybody in the gym knew that Dalton Knecht was going to shoot the next shot, with the exception of a few people. The problem was that those few people were on our team,” Will Hardy said.
It goes without saying that this is pretty unacceptable. It’s also not new for the Jazz: you may remember essentially the same thing occurring in the Jazz’s games against Keegan Murray and Donte DiVincenzo last year.
Watching the film, though, the primary problem here was someone who wasn’t on the team last year. Cody Williams drew the Knecht assignment during this stretch, and simply didn’t treat the shooting threat with the urgency it deserved.
Williams' rookie status does make this a bit less problematic, though it’s worth noting that the Jazz drafted Williams at least in part they believed he could be a plus defender, and he has not been that so far in his career. Perhaps this will be a lesson that pushes him in the right direction.
My biggest issue is how little the Jazz think together as a group. In a situation like that, there simply has to be a collective recognition of what’s going on on the floor, then an understanding of how to stop it. But the Jazz don’t really have a defensive leader or defensive leadership on this team, certainly not while Walker Kessler is out. Nobody’s really thinking about “how do we, as a group, defend what the Lakers are doing right now?” Instead, players seem much more focused about playing their own roles well.
We’ll see if that evolves over time. Obviously, the five men who were on the floor together when the Knecht explosion occurred won’t be on the floor together in the next good Jazz team. But all five can stand to improve at their own role and at working alongside others, and those could be transferable skills.
2. Breaking down the turnovers
The Jazz are obviously a bad team, but there’s not that much that they’re the very worst team in the NBA at. 3-point shooting? They’re only 25th! Assists? 25th! Defensive rebounding? 26th!
One thing they are the very worst in the league at though is turnovers. They rank dead last, and by a lot, turning the ball over more 18.6 times per game, significantly more than even the second-worst team, the Portland Trail Blazers (16.9 times). The Jazz only had 16 tonight, but 11 of those came in the first half, and were a big part of why this one was never really close.
So what’s going on? Well, PBPStats.com uses the NBA’s play-by-play to categorize bad turnovers. Here’s where they stand in each category, as well as where that ranks in the NBA’s hierarchy.
I don’t know that I have great news here: it turns out that the Jazz are among the worst teams in the league at all kinds of turnovers. It’s not just live ball turnovers that are killing them, they also have figured out how to give the ball to the other team with the clock stopped, too. They frequently lose the ball just dribbling it, but they also lose the ball passing it. They step out of bounds. Heck, they even offensive goaltend more than most teams.
Where do you start to solve this problem? No idea.
3. Will Hardy and J.J. Redick
Lakers coach J.J. Redick ended his pregame press conference in unique fashion tonight.
“I’m excited because this is my first time coaching against Will Hardy,” Redick said. “So I want to beat his a**.”
Naturally, with Hardy’s press conference just minutes later, we had to ask about that.
“Yeah, I’ve gotten to know JJ over the last couple of years. We have a lot of mutual people. I’ve always appreciated his general disposition, how he went about his job. I admired him when he played, how he went about his work as a player. You know, I grew up in Virginia, and ACC basketball was kind of all we watched. And so I got to watch JJ play a lot when he was at Duke and I was in high school, and have just kind of like admired how he’s gone about his journey as a player.”
“And then getting to know him the last couple of years, there was a lot more talk just kind of about basketball, the X’s and O‘s, and so I’ve appreciated getting to pick his brain, and we’ve had a lot of really fun conversations just about playing the game, whether that’s tactics on offense, defense, anything like that,” Hardy continued. “His competitiveness is very apparent. His tone sucks, but I’ll talk to him about that afterwards. I wasn’t going to say anything mean about him today. I wouldn’t stoop to his level.”
I’ll be honest, I was pretty impressed with Redick and the Lakers' coaching staff in watching this game tonight: they run their offense with a level of connectedness that was not present in the Darvin Ham era. This was my favorite play, I think:
Getting Markkanen on the perimeter (so he can’t help on anything), then getting the ball in the hands of your best passer, then having Anthony Davis fake a screen to roll to the hoop for a potential lob while at the same time running Knecht to the corner off a screen for a three? The defense has to make so many choices here, and it just can’t defend everything.
That’s good stuff. I’m on record as being anti-Lakers... but that’s just a cool play.
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