The Triple Team: Jazz players step up — including a career-best game for Grayson Allen — to defeat Suns

Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 118-97 win over the Phoenix Suns from Salt Lake Tribune beat writer Andy Larsen.

1. With five players out, five players step up

The Jazz had a entire lineup of players out for tonight’s game: Ricky Rubio was a late scratch with hamstring soreness, Dante Exum is out due to knee surgery, Kyle Korver has knee soreness, Jae Crowder has a quad contusion, and Derrick Favors has back spasms. That lineup hasn’t played together this season, but to be honest, I think that’d be a pretty good team.

So I asked Quin Snyder who he would rely on to take some of the roles that those guys fill.

"Everyone. I think that’s part of we want to feel as a group. It doesn’t fall on any one guy. The same way when everybody’s healthy, guys just have to be who they are."

I think the Jazz did that tonight. Those five guys were out, but five players — Donovan Mitchell, Joe Ingles, Raul Neto, Georges Niang, and Grayson Allen — played above their normal levels to get the team the win anyway.

We’ll start with Mitchell. Sure, 29 points isn’t really out of the norm for him: it’s his 19th performance with 29 points or more this season. But it is the first out of those 19 games in which he took fewer than 20 shots, and it’s the game in which he had the best assist-to-turnover ratio: 6 assists to only one give away. He had the 3-point shot going, making 4-7, and then the seven FTs meant he ended up with a nice line.

Joe Ingles tied his season-high with 27 points, and he did it while only taking 13 shots going 10-13 overall and 6-8 from deep. He also had eight assists, though was turnover prone with five giveaways. But I was most impressed with the variety of shots he made tonight — it was like he was playing HORSE or Around The World. He hit spot up threes from the corner and from up top. He made layups with a high-off-the-glass arc, and checked the trusty pass-fake layup off the to-do list. He hit a pull-up three off the high pick and roll, and hit step-backs going to his right. It was just a complete performance.

Raul Neto didn’t shoot particularly well, only going 3-9, but he played more minutes than he’s used to, with 21 of them, his third-highest total of the year. He also picked up four assists, but I thought he was the most consistent defensive option at his guard spot tonight; that might help explain why the Jazz outscored the Suns by 19 points in those 21 minutes.

Neto’s plus-minus was only surpassed by Georges Niang’s, who was a +23. That’s going to be great for Niang’s net rating, which hasn’t been brilliant this year. But he got the chance to finish a close game tonight because he outplayed Thabo Sefolosha, and his 3-5 shooting from deep really helped too. I asked him what it meant to him to finish an NBA game, and in non-garbage time.

“(It was) awesome," Niang told me, while teammate Royce O’Neale chanted his name. "The coaching staff has confidence in me to close out a game, especially when these games mean so much with seeding in the playoffs.”

2. Grayson Allen played well!

But we’re going to dedicate an entire Triple Team point to the play of Grayson Allen, who had his best game of the season with a career-high 14 points in 18 minutes.

He was good! His points came through two tricks: spotting up in the corner and making threes (an important skill, to be sure), and snaking on pick and roll, getting the defender on his back, and getting an open look. He did the latter three times, getting to the rim once for an easy layup, and then hitting two 5-10 foot floaters:

But the most impressive play was this block, where he showed off his athleticism, too:

That was the thing that stood out to me and head coach Quin Snyder: for the first time, Allen wasn’t a trainwreck defensively.

“I thought he did a great job on the defensive end. He really threw himself into it and competed,” Quin Snyder said. “His experience in the D-League really helped him.”

Some of this might have been because of his defensive assignments — he spent a lot of time on Jimmer Fredette, who is pretty athletically limited. But regardless, not getting blown by, and playing smart help defense are things we haven’t really seen from Allen.

I’ve been very down on Allen all season long: the list of guys in the modern era who came into the league at age 23 and had ugly rookie seasons, then went on to be contributors is really, really short. But I’m more optimistic now than I was two weeks ago, as this game plus his 30-point performance in the SLC Stars playoff game have shown promise.

3. A lot of travels

You know that old story about Nick Van Exel and “1-2-3 Cancun"? If you don’t, basically, in the 1998 Western Conference Finals, the Jazz swept the Lakers, right? Allegedly, in the middle of this series, as the Lakers were going down, Van Exel left a team huddle by saying “1-2-3 Cancun” rather than “1-2-3 Lakers,” or “1-2-3 defense” or whatever the team normally did. The implication: Van Exel was thinking about his travels more than the upcoming games.

Perhaps an appropriate cheer in this game would have been “1-2-3-4-5-6-7 Cancun”. Not because either team wasn’t trying hard: I actually think even the Suns were giving their best efforts. But the Jazz got called for so many travels during this game — seven — that I would believe it was somehow a trick that Quin Snyder was playing.

Seven is a ton of travels: it’s the most by any team in any game this season. Before tonight, the most was six travels called, which both the Bucks and the Wolves pulled off. But they did it early in the season, when referees are at their most stringent about those kinds of things. To get seven late in the season is legitimately impressive.

Rudy Gobert had four of those. He just dragged his pivot foot a couple of times, sometimes nearly imperceptibly, something Gobert probably does way more frequently than he’s called for. For whatever reason, tonight, the referees had eagle eyes and called it.

Gobert only had seven travels all season long before tonight, and while he was fourth in the Jazz leader list of travels before the game, he now moves into the lead. Here’s the full list: