Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 115-101 loss to the Dallas Mavericks from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.
1. Jazz couldn’t stop coughing the ball up inside
The Jazz won the points in the paint by 26 points tonight; 64-38. They still got smoked.
Why? Well the Jazz were too paint-heavy. Theystudidn’t space the floor. They only took 26 threes, and made only six. They tried making interior passes that were covered by other Mavericks in the lane.
Will Hardy put it well: “Dallas did a great job tonight of taking advantage of the moments where our spacing wasn’t very good. The person who was attacking the rim or attacking the paint didn’t have outlets.”
Take this Jordan Clarkson drive for example. He’s driving in the pick-and-roll, and encounters a whole lot of bodies. He should be able to find the open guy, right?
Well, Lauri Markkanen is open, but probably 30 feet away, and there are two guys between Clarkson and that corner.
How about everyone else? Luka Doncic is between the ball and Rudy Gay, and Gay doesn’t really try to re-space to a position Clarkson can find him. But more critically, Collin Sexton doesn’t rotate open to the space behind Clarkson that might be passable, if he turns around — you can see Clarkson actually tries to do this, at the end. And Walker Kessler rolls so late that he’s just not a realistic option to throw the lob to. In the end, Clarkson’s out of luck, even though he has 4 people in the paint with him.
Now, yeah, I wish Clarkson would also drive more under control, where he doesn’t get into the air before he finds his open man. The 21-year-old Talen Horton-Tucker is even worse at this: sometimes, you’re just driving into the teeth of the defense.
Ah, that’s pure, unsullied youth right there. That’s not spacing.
There’s obviously nothing better in the NBA than a dunk or a layup. But those so rarely come from the ballhandler directly from the get-go. Instead, using drives to draw the defense in, then find an open roller or shooter is the name of the NBA game right now, and the Jazz are really struggling on finding how to consistently do that.
2. Overall preseason stats
Who played well, who didn’t this preseason? Here are the players’ stats, from NBA.com:
Jazz final preseason stats, NBA.com.
After missing most of last season due to injury, Collin Sexton struggled in the preseason, averaging just nine points per game while mostly coming off the bench. Like many of his Jazz teammates, he’ll have to learn that the in-traffic shots just aren’t good value.
I was surprised to see Jarred Vanderbilt as the team’s lowest plus-minus guy, and I was surprised to see him only shooting 40% given how all of his shots are around the rim. Figuring out how he fits in this new, weird context is going to be important.
Lauri Markkanen was the Jazz’s best preseason player. Didn’t even shoot the 3-ball well, but rebounded well and shot a high percentage anyway. Walker Kessler played really well too, I thought. 66% field-goal percentage, got to the line, rebounded well, the whole thing.
Obviously, it’s just the preseason, and we’ve seen huge discrepancies in players’ preseason play and regular season play before. But, frankly, this year’s regular season games are likely to matter just about as much as the preseason games, and I did generally think we saw most players play their hardest over the last four games.
3. Cut news
It was a bit dreary on Friday night after the game.
Now 2+ years removed from the pandemic, media is allowed back in the locker rooms again. And that means we saw Stanley Johnson get called back into the front office’s lounge at Vivint Arena, where he was told the bad news that he’d be cut. After he got the news, he told former Lakers teammate Horton-Tucker straight away, who seemed surprised by the decision.
What do we think about cutting Johnson? It was pretty clear that the last two cuts were among Azubuike, Johnson, Leandro Bolmaro, and Jared Butler, all of whom were outside of Will Hardy’s rotation. (Rudy Gay would be the other possibility, but Hardy and the 36-year-old go way back to San Antonio, and it’s clear there’s a mutual affinity there — even though Gay isn’t going to help the Jazz long term.) I’m told that the Jazz have explored trade possibilities for all four players this week.
Keeping Bolmaro and Butler would simply just keeping the youngest of the four. That makes sense, given the Jazz’s position. Butler expires after this season, but the Jazz will have restricted free agency on him. Bolmaro, meanwhile, the Jazz could theoretically keep at a discount for the next two years after this one if he pops.
That being said, I do think Johnson is the most valuable NBA player of the group right now — and has a pretty solid chance at being the best NBA player down the road, too. He’s just going to be an unrestricted free agent next year, so he doesn’t have long-term value to the Jazz. Given that he was out of the rotation, it’s hard to find a way that he’d garner trade value over the next few months.
Still, on a personal level, Stanley Johnson ruled. He gave terrific interviews, and really seemed to enjoy explaining the NBA game to us. He’s legitimately charismatic, and I hope he does well in his next stop. He’ll find a place on another NBA team in a hurry. Due to NBA rules, though, that team can’t be the L.A. Lakers, the team that just traded him away.
Does Johnson’s waiver make us think differently about the Patrick Beverley for Talen Horton-Tucker trade? Not really — that was always about trading an old player in his prime for a young player who, while worse right now, might be something one day.
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