As the Utah Jazz’s new players have been acclimating to one another and to new head coach Will Hardy, throughout these first few weeks, there’s been one theme that consistently comes up to describe the atmosphere.
“Practice has been intense, It’s been competitive,” said Jarred Vanderbilt.
“This year has been more competitive,” agreed Malik Beasley, his former Nuggets and Timberwolves teammate.
“Everybody’s competing, everybody’s going hard,” added Jordan Clarkson.
“On the competitive side,” said Collin Sexton.
“The level of competitiveness is obviously up,” said Ochai Agbaji.
Perhaps such an atmosphere is not hugely surprising, given that the Jazz right now have players fighting for spots in the starting lineup, spots in the rotation, spots on the 15-man roster. Then again, to a man, all the players have all said that Hardy’s training camp and practices have been particularly vigorous.
As point guard Mike Conley sauntered into a post-practice media session, his T-shirt soaked through with sweat, he was rhetorically asked if he’d been going hard.
“Yes sir,” he answered, mustering a tired grin. “I haven’t practiced like that in a long time.”
There has been a substantial emphasis placed on competition by Hardy and his staff. But what exactly does that mean? How is it manifested? And to what end?
Even as several veteran players have noted that this has been a different vibe from any previous preseason they’ve been in — and several Jazz holdovers have pointed out the sizable gap between how Hardy is doing things and how Quin Snyder did it the past several seasons — the new coach spelled out some of the what and the how and the why of his methods.
“Everything we do in practice has a winner and a loser. We want there to be stakes when they compete,” Hardy said. “We do some scrimmaging, we do some situational games where we change the clock and the score, and today we did some stuff where there’s a really short shot clock, full court, to try to emphasize some pace. So there’s a lot of different ways that we can manipulate it in practice, but we really want everything in our practice to have a competitive element to it.”
As for those aforementioned stakes, is wounded pride sufficient, or are there more tangible consequences for losing?
“Oh no, you have to run,” he said. “If there aren’t stakes, sometimes it doesn’t sink in quite the same.”
His players, meanwhile, have made it known that the running and the pride component are equally effective motivators with this bunch.
“Guys don’t want to run! And not only do guys not want to run, but guys don’t want to lose,” said rookie center Walker Kessler. “All these guys are at the highest level in their athletic field, so they all have that competitive drive, regardless of what it is. It could be counting straws — we want to win. So just continually pushing that to us makes us competitive.”
Asked how much the losers have to run, forward Lauri Markkanen didn’t have a good answer:
“I mean, we’ve been winning a lot, so …”
More seriously, he added that having built-in repercussions and ramifications to literally everything the Jazz are learning right now has made for fun and productive circumstances.
“Yeah, I think we’re pushing each other every drill, no matter if it’s a shooting drill or playing transition, playing 2-on-1, it doesn’t matter if we’re 5-on-5 — we’re all competing,” Markkanen said. “And it’s a good environment to be in; it makes you focus on your best, giving the best of your ability on every job. That’s how we do it.”
Stanley Johnson, who was playing for a fifth NBA team in eight seasons before being waived late last week, said that Hardy was “super-unique” in some of his methods, while equating him to highly-regarded Raptors coach Nick Nurse in terms of having an ability to keep players on their toes and keep them mentally engaged with different concepts.
He added that Hardy likes to mix things up — whether it be going to shorter shot clocks, or three-minute mini-games, or giving one team an advantage — in order to see how hard players will go to overcome the circumstances stacked against them.
“We get graded on winning and losing. So I like that we do it in practice a lot, because that’s what the games are about,” Johnson said. “… All the practices are situational, which, for me in games, that helps more. I wish more coaches would play more live stuff [in practices], so I’m glad we’re doing it now.”
Hardy has done a good job of recognizing what this team needs and developing a plan around it.
One of Snyder’s favorite refrains when he was with the Jazz was that no two teams were ever the same (even with virtually the same roster) year over year.
No one will confuse this year’s Jazz team with last year’s. And so, there’s no sense in approaching practices the same way, either.
“Last year, [the core had] been together for, what — two or three years? Our camp was a little more chill going into the season,” said Clarkson. “Here [now], it’s a bunch of learning.”
“A lot of it is obviously personnel-based. We’ve had teams here that had a lot of vet guys on the team, guys who’ve been through 10, 11 training camps; when you have that, you have shorter practices, you get to stuff a little quicker and more condensed,” added Conley. “But the more young legs you have, it’s like an hour, two hours, two and a half — you just keep going and going. That’s the biggest difference. And these guys, all of them have been really hungry.”
That, of course, is what Hardy wants, what he’s been aiming for.
Even as the masses looking at the team from the outside in project a difficult season that is likely to end with a draft pick in the lottery, the coach wants his team to be — if nothing else — well, competitive.
“I think it’s good for our group to start to come together. There’s something about competing on a team with others that really helps you out,” Hardy said. “I’m not sure that going through practice without stakes would be helpful for this group.”
Johnson thinks the coach’s point has been made and received.
“This has been a very good, hard training camp. You see my hands all taped up, my knees taped up?” he said. “It’s been a good training camp.”
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