The Triple Team: Is the Jazz’s 3-point strategy the right one?

1. On the 3-point strategy

On the team’s stat sheet, there are only two reasons the Jazz lost this game: the 3-point line and turnovers. The Jazz shot 23% compared to the Hornets’ 48% from deep, and the Jazz had 19 turnovers compared to the Hornets’ 10. I’m going to mostly write about the former tonight, because the Jazz’s turnover issues are season-long and I’ve just covered them to the point of exhaustion before.

So, 3-point shooting. When I see a 20-9 advantage in 3PM, worth 33 points, what’s going through my mind?

1. The research is pretty clear: opponents don’t have much of an impact on 3-point percentages in the NBA. To be sure, shot quality metrics exist, but by and large the way to defend the 3-point line is by preventing the 3-point shots overall.

2. But, the Hornets shot 42 threes tonight, but they normally shoot 33 threes. So that’s not good 3-point defense.

3. But, that’s Will Hardy’s defensive strategy. In his own words, from tonight’s postgame press conference:

“I think we have enough of a sample size now... where we overreact to threes, we end up giving them everything. The games that we’ve tried to run people off the 3-point line, it’s not like we’ve taken those away. We also ended up just putting ourselves in really big rotations and sometimes it exposes our size at the rim. We put Walker in tough spots when he’s out there and he’s the only rim protector.”

Their strategy, instead, is to send help at the rim from the top, instead allowing open threes.

4. And the Hornets only had 34 points in the paint, so that’s good.

5. Overall, is this a good strategy? On one hand, the Jazz rank 26th in the NBA in half-court defense, so that’s poor. In the 20 games the Jazz have allowed the most threes, they have a 7-13 record. They have a 9-11 record in the games where they’ve allowed the fewest threes. So, it’s better when they allow fewer threes, but not drastically so.

What about when they allow a lot of shots at the rim? In those 20 games when they allowed the most shots at the rim, they’re 6-14, but in the 20 games when they prevented shots at the rim, they’re 12-8.

What strikes me about Hardy’s strategy is that it probably is the right one, but it’s a high variance one. It means that you’ll lose games you should win, like against the Hornets. It also might mean you win games you should lose. Overall, I’m more worried about the turnovers than the 3-point defense.

2. Taylor Hendricks and Brice Sensabaugh

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