By Jaden Singh
This week, the Utah Jazz have regressed to their standard .500 ways and now sit at a square 23-23. But since mid-December? A 16-7 stretch of games has turned a lifeless lottery team into a reasonably competitive (and quite aesthetic!) squad that is well worth watching. Danny Ainge’s junkyard collection of trade residue and unheralded journeymen is graduating from “interesting” to “maybe good,” depending on how much synergy coach Will Hardy can summon in a given matchup. When the teamwork magic hits, this team is much greater than the sum of its parts.
It is unclear how impressive a starting lineup of Kris Dunn, Collin Sexton, Simone Fontecchio, Lauri Markkanen, and John Collins would be. It doesn’t even include Utah’s second-best player, Walker Kessler. But this lineup works: through 363 possessions, Utah’s starters have a healthy +5.8 net rating and score a fantastic 126 points per 100 possessions. Every player can either move the ball effectively or present a strong scoring threat themselves, and every player is an adequate shooter. Utah bases many of its actions on the excellent spacing such a lineup provides: Markkanen, for example, gets a couple of easy points a game after a switch because any help rotations are either too long to make or lead to easy corner threes. Hardy’s complex off-ball screening actions also require constant defensive communication to guard properly; especially in the regular season, that’s a hard standard to uphold. Utah’s players are at their best when capitalizing on these errors. In a static isolation, or out of a basic two-man pick and roll, the Jazz don’t have the types of ball handlers that instantly break down their defender and create massive defensive holes. Markkanen, Sexton, and Fontecchio instead thrive when the defense starts with just a step in the wrong direction – Sexton with a straight line burst to the rim, Fontecchio with his three-point shot, Markkanen with a shot fake into a hard drive.
Markkanen in particular is worth highlighting. It was unclear if he’d continue playing at the all-star level he demonstrated last year, but amazingly, very little has changed. He is still an exceptional play finisher at all three levels: 67 percent at the rim, 47 percent in the midrange, and 39 percent from deep is a rare combination. His fluidity and explosiveness at his height (a proper seven feet, which most ‘unicorns’ like Jaren Jackson Jr. don’t hit) remains mindblowing to me and unreported elsewhere. His decision-making, crucial in a movement-heavy system like Hardy’s, is accurate and immediate. Maybe his 24 points per game and two assists per game are unimpressive for a first option on a decent team. That ignores part of what makes Markkanen so valuable in the first place — the Jazz don’t run their offense through him! He scoops high-value scoring possessions out of what the defense naturally gives him. No shot clock wasting, no erratic shot selection. A guy all 30 teams in the league would love to have.
I don’t see things playing out much beyond a play-in run for this team. There is not enough raw talent and athleticism to compete at the upper levels of the playoffs. However, this recent stretch is encouraging for several reasons: it has showcased growth in players like Sexton, Fontecchio, and Dunn, who potentially will be on the roster in future seasons; it provides a good base level of competitiveness if Utah wants to use its draft assets to acquire a star via trade; it reaffirms that Will Hardy can be the long term answer at head coach. For Jazz fans, it’s also more fun to watch the games when there’s some expectation of high-level basketball. They run modern offense and they do it well, which was hard to say in November.
Finally – yeah, removing Talen Horton-Tucker from the rotation was a good move.
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