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Defensive issues mute Utah Jazz
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By Zach Lowe
January 24, 2011
We’ve entered the NBA’s dog days now, and when a team starts stumbling in January and February, it’s hard to know whether to dismiss the struggles as products of midseason malaise or worry about deeper problems. Last year’s Celtics, 27-27 over their last 54 games, are the most recent reminder that overreacting to a midseason slump can be dangerous.
But it’s worth looking at what’s going with Utah. A Jazz team that once looked like it might develop into a legitimate contender just wrapped up an 0-4 road swing through the Eastern Conference in which it struggled to compete against the Nets, Wizards and Sixers. The Jazz’s loss in Boston — a 24-point whipping — wasn’t a shock, but it was jarring to watch Utah mount late rallies just to get back into games against two certain lottery teams and one borderline playoff contender. Deron Williams is complaining about the team’s defense and subtly pushing Jerry Sloan to tweak the starting lineup, which has left Utah trailing after almost every first quarter. Sloan finally made a change against Philadelphia on Saturday, when he inserted Gordon Hayward for Andrei Kirilenko — to mostly disastrous results.
The four-game whitewash represents the nadir of a two-month trend that deserves some hand-wringing: the total regression of Utah’s defense, which started the season in top-10 form and now looks like a liability. As John Hollinger noted at ESPN.com, the Jazz sported the lowest opponent field-goal and three-point percentages in the league in early December. They had held teams to 42.5 percent from the floor and 30.7 percent from deep. That helped Utah make up for two bad early-season trends.
One — a recurring problem for the Jazz — is no one fouls more than they do. Opponents have long feasted at the line against Sloan’s teams, and that doesn’t figure to change.
The other — a new issue as of December – is the Jazz’s inability to protect the defensive glass.
Over the last six weeks or so, the nightmare scenario for Utah has played out. Both of those early problematic trends have continued, while opponents have started to make shots. Teams shot 46 percent from the floor (and 39 percent from three) against the Jazz in December; those numbers have jumped to 47.3 percent and 40 percent so far in January. Meanwhile, the Jazz still give up the most free throws per shot attempt, and, most disturbing of all, they’ve settled in at 27th in defensive rebounding rate. The latter trend is especially disturbing, because Utah ranked fifth in that category last season, meaning their defensive rebounding has collapsed much more dramatically than we should have expected given the loss of Carlos Boozer (a better rebounder than either Al Jefferson or Paul Millsap).
In fact, only seven teams since 1973-74 have seen their place in the league’s defensive rebounding hierarchy (as measured by percentile rather than raw rank, given the changing number of teams in the league) drop further in one season than Utah’s has so far, according to Basketball-Reference.
A deeper look at Utah’s defense suggests the problem lies in the pick-and-roll — and specifically in its inability to stop dribble penetration at the top. An exhaustive look at video points to, primarily, the inability (or reluctance) of Millsap and Jefferson to jump out aggressively and cut off ball-handlers before they turn the corner. For whatever reason, both prefer mostly to sag back as Williams chases point guards over screens. That’s fairly common, and good big men can drop back and still manage to cut off a ball-handler if their positioning is sound and their feet are quick.
Jefferson and Millsap can’t pull off the trick consistently. And when point guards get into the teeth of a defense, bad things happen — open shots, fouls and offensive rebounds that result from Utah’s big men having to help on the pick-and-roll action.
The numbers bear this out. Only three teams allow a higher points per possession mark on spot-up opportunities, according to the stat-tracking service Synergy Sports. I’d wager that a large percentage of those open looks comes off of pick-and-rolls. Utah’s defense is also allowing significantly more points this season on pick-and-roll plays when the ball-handler finishes the play with a shot, drawn foul or turnover, according to Synergy. Utah ranked second last year in defending such plays; it’s 18th this season.
It would be easy to blame Williams for this, but it’s unreasonable to expect point guards to consistently stay in front of their counterparts on pick-and-roll plays. Williams is a generally solid (if not elite) defender, and though his size might make it harder for him to squeeze over screens in the vein of Rajon Rondo or Chris Paul, he’s mostly doing his part; he needs more help from his big men.
There don’t appear to be any easy answers here. Five of Utah’s six most commonly used lineups (including the starting lineup Sloan used until Saturday) have been atrocious defensively, and four of those five groups include the Millsap-Jefferson pairing. Lineups including at least two bench players have generally fared much better, but those lineups won’t score enough over the long haul for Sloan to realistically play them heavy minutes.
A four-game losing streak — even a bad one like this, which is the Jazz’s longest in almost exactly two years — isn’t a crisis. Utah is still going to make the playoffs, and it has a decent chance at snagging home-court advantage for the first round. But it will be hard to see the Jazz as a playoff threat if their defense in April looks more like the sieve it’s been over the last two months than the stifling machine it was through early December.
NBA News Archive:
2011, 2010, 2009
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