Another addition, Hassan Whiteside, surely offers a better traditional five option behind Gobert than Derrick Favors did a year ago. New additions Rudy Gay, Danuel House and Eric Paschall all see playing time off the bench now, offering more options for small-ball fives in the non-Gobert units and powerful fours who can offer some secondary interior defense and rim protection. Losing Joe Ingles hurt, but he played smaller than his 6-foot-8 size.
Quietly, however, this Utah team is bigger. The hemorrhage of points to the Clippers in the second half of last spring’s Game 6 was a particularly poignant reminder of this shortcoming.
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Their bugaboo has always been a lack of size and length at the four positions not manned by Rudy Gobert, so if opponents sucked Gobert away from the rim, there were a lot of free points available. Additionally, the formula for beating the Jazz might not be quite as easy this season. Utah, remember, had both guards limited by injuries last season against the Clippers, which was a major reason its perimeter defense cratered in the postseason. However, there are extenuating circumstances. Of course, this is similar to what we saw a year ago, when Utah had the league’s top six three-man lineups in the regular season and still couldn’t get out of the second round of the playoffs against an injury-riddled opponent. (While we’re here, a fun note for the extreme small-sample-size crowd: Philly’s Harden-Joel Embiid lineup is +43.1 points per 100 in its 53 minutes together thus far.) A quick look at the chart below shows this is comparable to Golden State’s Steph Curry-Green pairing and Boston’s Jaylen Brown-Jayson Tatum pairings and better than Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo-Jrue Holiday, Phoenix’s Chris Paul-Devin Booker, and Denver’s Nikola Jokić-Aaron Gordon. Two-man lineups of Gobert and Mitchell have outscored the opposition by a whopping 13.3 points per 100 possessions this year after blitzing teams by 13.0 per 100 in 2020-21. Additionally, Utah’s scoring margin on the season is better than that of any other team except Phoenix or Golden State even those teams don’t lead the Jazz by much.ĭig deeper, and the stars are driving it. The Jazz have a 28-11 mark in games Gobert and Mitchell both play. Look at the data for Utah, and some notable trends emerge.
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The nice thing about a full season of data, however, is that teams will invariably have had lineups with their best players on the court for at least a decent chunk of playing time. Yes, shooting variance introduces noise into lineup data, especially those of the low-minute variety. Every team is looking for that edge come playoff time the deeper into the postseason, the less depth matters and the more it comes down to your best five against the other guy’s best five. We all harken back to Golden State’s “death lineup” that used Draymond Green at center to annihilate the opposition in the peak of the Splash Brothers era. Nonetheless, the weekend Utah had - not to mention the weekend the Sixers had in their new James Harden-fueled incarnation - takes us to a bigger story as we head to the playoff race: the search for killer lineup combos.
Also, Dallas appeared to play into Utah’s hands Friday by trying to draw Gobert into switches onto Luka Dončić rather than, say, any defender not named Gobert. The Jazz were a regular-season juggernaut a year ago, you’ll remember, before getting picked apart by a shorthanded Clippers team in the second round of the playoffs. Of course, Utah beating its potential first-round foe Friday and its potential second-round foe Sunday may or may not portend anything for the playoffs. The Jazz won, of course, behind Donovan Mitchell’s shot-making and some outstanding late defense by Rudy Gobert, and there’s a common thread there, which we’ll get to in a minute. Watching the Jazz beat Dallas here Friday night, and then Utah’s win in Phoenix Sunday, was a good reminder that a fully loaded Jazz team is not easily dismissed as a playoff threat, despite its fourth-place position in the standings and the disappointment of the past two postseasons. Your feelings about that go a long way toward your feelings about whether the Utah Jazz have legitimate title aspirations this season. SALT LAKE CITY - How much do you believe the lineup data?