Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 122-115 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.
1. Hey, its turnovers again
With a largely active roster, the Jazz played most of their best players tonight. Isaiah Collier, Collin Sexton, Lauri Markkanen, John Collins, and Walker Kessler all started. So why did they lose? The same reason the team has lost much of the year.
(CleaningTheGlass)
Those are the four factors, the four statistics that largely explain the game of basketball. Rebounding and turnover categories reflect how many chances you have, field goal percentage and free throw rate shows how efficient you are with your chances.
And you can see where the Jazz fell short: turnovers. They gave up 23, while only forcing nine from the Grizzlies.
It’s been the biggest issue all season long — the Jazz rank very last in the NBA in coughing up the ball. They also rank very last in the NBA at collecting the ball from other teams. With or without their best players available, it’s been an issue: for example, the Jazz’s turnovers go up most when John Collins is on the court when compared to every other Jazz player.
Tonight wasn’t Collins. It was about the Jazz’s guards, who simply had major trouble holding onto the ball, making poor pass decisions and dribbling mistakes everywhere. Long passes with no chance, backcourt violations, dribbling off your foot, getting trapped against the sideline, we saw it all tonight. You can too, at the NBA’s stat website.
It would be relatively easy to excuse the issue due to the Jazz’s lack of chemistry from not playing together, and I’m sure that is some of what’s going on.
But truth be told, I think the individual players simply need to tighten up their games. Collier has to turn the passing risk meter down several notches. Sexton has to pass earlier in his drives. Clarkson needs to recognize earlier that he doesn’t have an advantage on his defender (and may just need to tone down the usage at this stage of his career), and so on.
2. The Player Participation Policy makes an appearance
The Jazz were fined $100K by the NBA today for sitting Lauri Markkanen so much. In particular, they cited the March 5 game against the Wizards, “as well as other recent games,” for the fine.
Yeah, the Jazz probably deserve that one.
Markkanen missed the last nine games before tonight, all while healthy. While some Jazz fans complained that other tanking teams have also rested their stars, I have to be frank: if you go through the box scores, no team has been as blatant about it as the Jazz have been this season.
Of course, the Jazz would take as many $100K fines as they could handle if it increased their odds of getting Cooper Flagg, who by himself is probably worth over $100 million. But there’s a escalating fine structure, where the second fine is $250K, the third fine $1.25M, the fourth fine $2.25M, and so on. Meanwhile, the Jazz would have to win at least three more games than New Orleans does to fall out of top Flagg odds, at which point their chances of getting Flagg go down 1.5%.
Experienced readers can see what I’m setting up here: it’s a simple cost-benefit calculation. You can probably take 1-2 more Player Participation Policy fines. But if your odds at a $100 million asset are only changing by 1.5%, and its costing your organization more than $2 million to risk losing those odds, it may make sense just to play Markkanen.
That’s what I expect happens the rest of the year: the team gets cute under the strict guidelines of the Player Participation Policy. Markkanen plays most of the time, but might sit one end of a back to back — because there’s some language in the league’s policy about back-to-back sitting being more acceptable. (The Jazz only have two of those left, though.)
And because the Player Participation Policy only covers star players, I fully expect all of the Jazz’s other players to sit when the Jazz play the Wizards again next week. It might be Markkanen and four fans out there, but it’d probably be technically legal.
3. The Jazz all wear headbands?
For the first time in franchise history, all of the Jazz players — save Collin Sexton — wore headbands on the court.
This is more strange for the Jazz than it would be for other franchises. For his tenure, Hall of Fame head coach Jerry Sloan didn’t allow headbands for 23 years, which Ty Corbin then also defended after taking over head coaching duties.
“I haven’t seen a headband yet that helps a guy make a shot or a get a rebound,” Corbin said then. “We’ve got towels if they want to wipe the sweat off their face.”
It wasn’t really until 2019, when the Jazz acquired Mike Conley, that a player important enough wanted to wear a headband while playing. Snyder had no problem with the headbands, and so officially ended the Jazz’s unwritten headband rule.
That being said, we hadn’t seen players take up headbands en masse before like this.
Jazz sideline reporter Lauren Green said the change happened thanks to rookie point guard Isaiah Collier’s new hair style. Collier needed the headband with the new small ‘fro, and then another unnamed player in the locker room copied him. Eventually, everyone on the team, save Sexton, wore one in the game — which is a lot of fun.
(I don’t, by the way, think Sexton’s failure to wear a headband is a sign of being a bad teammate or anything. But he is, by a significant amount, the most particular and intense Jazz player about his routine, warmup and feel on the court, and so I suspect he figured the headband would mess him up.)
There’s no word on what Jerry Sloan would have said if he were still around. But, I don’t know, in the midst of a season like this, I appreciate the camaraderie and silliness of what we saw today.
Props, too, to Boler and Thurl for getting in on the act.
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