Utah Jazz: Re-Predicting 2014-15 Player Performances

Apr 14, 2014; Salt Lake City, UT, USA; Utah Jazz guard

(left) and center

(15) and guard

(10) react on the bench late during the fourth quarter against the Los Angeles Lakers at EnergySolutions Arena. The Lakers won 119-104. Mandatory Credit: Russ Isabella-USA TODAY Sports

Fansided sister site Hoops Habit recently presented a piece that attempts to predict some of the upcoming Utah Jazz players’ season accomplishments. While Ben and the staffers there do a fantastic job, it feels like there are several misconceptions and assumptions presented in said piece concerning what is likely this year for the Jazz franchise.

Let’s take a look at a few of the statements that may have left Jazz fans scratching their heads in confusion, and throw in a couple more overlooked observations for good measure.

“[Utah] can certainly expect to improve on 25 wins.”

After the hiring of Quin Snyder I may have gotten a little excited when I said I thought the Jazz should win about 35 games this season, representing a ten game improvement. Upon further consideration — and after the adrenaline wore off — that might have been a little high. Technically, the above statement by the good Mr. Woodward should be true, but with an expected rotation with an average age under 24 years old this Jazz team didn’t get dramatically better yet.

In the past few seasons the franchise has always carried a few veterans as a kind of insurance policy to try and counteract the many mistakes young players typically make while developing and finding their place in the world. That isn’t the case this season. Rather, Jazz brass have chosen to wait out the growing pains and fully invest in the future (possibly waiting out the LeBron James era?).

Sure, they brought in Steve Novak, but that wasn’t so much for a veteran presence as for spreading the floor in specific matchups and giving the offense an occasional injection of life when it stalls out, as it certainly will often enough.

Yes, technically, Utah should still improve on their meager win total of last season, but that will be more of a systematic change than anything. They should improve moderately on defense and hopefully on offense, but this is an entirely new system that will take time to instill and find chemistry within. A sudden leaping aberration like the Phoenix Suns had last year simply isn’t likely to happen with a group this young, still getting to know each other, and all new schemes on both ends of the floor.

Patience will still be the word of the day for Jazz fans for some time to come.

Trey Burke

Ben has a decent handle on Trey Burke’s immediate future, in my opinion.

“Trey Burke should settle into his role as the Utah Jazz starting point guard very nicely in 2014-15” is a statement I can get behind.

At the press conference to introduce Quin Snyder as the new head coach of the Utah Jazz, radio voice David Locke reported Snyder showed up with 14 pages of pick-and-roll offense and defense, a sore spot for the squad in recent seasons.

After two decades of a steady diet of PnR there was actually a time when the Utah Jazz were ahead of the NBA curve here. With Karl Malone and John Stockton, Jerry Sloan pummeled opposition into submission on a near nightly basis, so much so that Jazzland used to complain about it, simply because they tired of seeing it constantly.

Then, due mainly to personnel changes, Utah went away from the PnR as bread and butter. Meanwhile, the majority of the league now uses the pick-and-roll as a large part of their scheme, particularly against teams like the Jazz that have defended it so poorly over the last few years.

Expect that to change for the better, and probably immediately on offense (while it may take some time for it to sink in on defense). Trey Burke was lauded as a PnR specialist at Michigan, and he has a willing and able partner to finish the roll in Derrick Favors. This pair could make up a sizable portion of the Jazz’s offense in the halfcourt right away, as well as several pick-n-pop options.

Just how well does Quin Snyder understand the principles of teaching the PnR? A few years ago Snyder collaborated on a FIBA publication on the topic (PDF).

Trey Burke will play a much larger role this year than many local media and fans may realize, I suspect.

“[Alec] Burks is slated to make just more than $3 million in 2014-15, and considering his potential scoring ability that we’ve seen only flashes of, I believe he’s worth every penny of that.” 

Well, Ben, that’s because he’s still on his rookie deal.

To be fair, the point Ben may have been making is that Burks could make some serious noise this season, and in the process drive up his upcoming contract negotiation value. Coming out of Colorado, scouts were concerned that he tends to be ball dominant — something he still shows a tendency toward — as well as a penchant to shoot often while not efficiently.

Burks has alleviated one of those concerns with a more-than-respectable-for-a-guard .457 overall field goal percentage last season, as Ben pointed out. At 35% for his young career from three, and a .547 True Shooting percentage last season, shooting the basketball has turned out to be less of a concern than many previously thought it might be at the NBA level.

Trey Burke isn’t likely to make those opportunities for Burks, though, as Ben surmises. Rather, when Burks gets the ball he’s most likely to attempt to create his own shot or die trying (Read: get to the free throw line, where he shot close to 75% last year on the most attempts on the team, per 36 minutes played) , something he’s used elite athleticism to do to this point in his career.

Alec Burks’ favorite move is to get the pass in position for a corner three, pump fake, then race the baseline and make something happen at the rim. So far, scouts haven’t seen enough of Burks to effectively stop his uber-athleticism in the paint, but Burks will be forced to expand his repertoire as he garners more attention, something I, like Ben seems to also believe he can do.

Burks gets to the paint as well as any slashing guard in the NBA. If he adds passing in the paint as a skill he’ll do not only his teammates a favor, but himself as well, since defenses will be kept honest as he makes his move.

Time for the fun one: Gordon Hayward

I’ve written extensively on Gordon Hayward here at PnB. Yet despite that, expectations from those both inside and outside the fanbase remain unrealistically high in many camps, which likely doesn’t bother him in the least — he’s tougher on himself than anyone in the blogosphere could possibly be.

The one from Mr. Woodward Jazzland will take exception to is “[Hayward] shoots high percentage shots.” This is both an eyeball test fail and a simple stat check fail.

The former was probably largely due to the system in place coupled with a desire by brass to see Hayward’s worth after failed contract negotiations. Meanwhile, the latter is easily searched with any number of shot chart checks; the Jazz guard-forward took more of the lowest percentage shots in basketball than any other type of field goal attempt last season.

Gordon Hayward shooting splits for 2013-14

Ben projects Hayward at 19 points, 6 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game, while our colleague Dan Clayton projects Gordon at something very similar, from 18/5/5 to 20/5/5 this season, and running the PnR often, maybe more than Burke, which would surprise me.

As pointed out in this piece on Hayward, it might seem like a simple leap, but once you browse the actual list of players who have accomplished these astronomical numbers, it actually puts into perspective what Hayward did last season more than say — unintentionally — that he’s an almost sure Hall of Famer already. Leaps in the NBA are more than making one more basket, rebound and assist. There’s a good reason these lists are elite players and HOF’ers.

I expect Hayward to carry a little less of the load, not more, with the ball being spread around and shared more, in the San Antonio Spurs way, where so many of the current Jazz brass and staff have been snarfed from. Hayward is more likely to get more open looks, if less FGAs, instead of the contested ones he was forced to create in so many late shot clocks last year. The effect should be higher efficiency, if not a numbers leap into the HOF stratosphere as is the conventional wisdom among pundits.

“I expect Derrick Favors to play his natural position, which is the power forward.” 

“The door is open for Enes Kanter to take over the starting center job. [He] possesses the skills to be a cookie cutter NBA center.”

Don’t expect that.

While one of Snyder’s biggest talking points, and rightfully so — again in the Spurs’ vein — is “positionless basketball” that takes advantage of individual matchups rather than traditional 1-2-3-4-5 spots where you simply field your best player and hope to win the matchup, today’s NBA dictates you have a defender at the rim, which Kanter isn’t.

Furthermore, Snyder has indicated that he intends to try to make Enes Kanter more stretchy. That is, he will likely start the season with Kanter at the PF and take advantage of his natural range, a skill we didn’t see much of under Tyrone Corbin for whatever reason. Favors and Kanter did not play well together last season, both occupying the same space much of the time. Snyder intends to try and rectify this by Europeanizing Kanter’s game a bit.

We could say this is sort of like how Sloan used Mehmet Okur, but the Jazz lacked defense from either Okur or his PF counterpart, Carlos Boozer, that Favors is capable of providing.

This could be the last hurrah for Kanter as a Jazzman, if this doesn’t work and he’s benched in favor of offseason energy acquisition Trevor Booker. As Dan Clayton points out, Enes is the most likely trade chip of the young assembly, especially if he can’t show more focus and less propensity for being utterly lost on defense, something that got him benched for Marvin Williams last season. It’s very possible that Snyder gets as frustrated with his defense as Ty Corbin did.

“One thing Derrick Favors needs desperate improvement on is staying out of foul trouble.”

Coming off of the bench for the Jazz is where we all saw the monstrous defensive potential of Favors. But that was a bit of smoke and mirrors, a mirage. When you know your time is limited you can afford to come in and gamble a bit, leave it all out there, make a few spectacular plays that leaves fans screaming for more.

As a rookie for New Jersey he averaged 6.0 personal fouls per 36 minutes. Favors’ last season coming off the bench in Utah he still averaged 5.0 PF per 36 minutes. Yes, this has been a problem for him in the past.

But as a regular starter for Utah for the first time last year we saw two problems that weren’t that: 1) He was often gassed 2) He seemed to have lost all that highly touted defensive presence

No longer could Favors afford to come in and play dominant, athletic energy guy with fouls to burn. Now he had to last entire games, for all 82 of ’em if he could help it (he started and played in 73 games in 2013-14).

For about two-thirds of the 2013-14 season, Favors was ineffective as a rim protector, compared to what we were used to seeing from him. He was less aggressive, less a deterrent to opposing offenses, who took advantage, leaving fans and pundits stammering and digging for defense of his defense.

Now you know why; he was trying to stay on the floor. And for the last third of last season Derrick Favors did indeed finally find that delicate balance between being an effective rim defender and going the distance. With ever-improving range and passing, this is a season in which Derrick Favors could finally make that big splash we’ve all been waiting for.

A quick stat check shows that Favors and Kanter shared an identical 3.9 personal fouls per 36 minutes rate last season. Now, which of these two would you prefer anchoring your defense in today’s NBA?

Gobert or go home

Making waves in the FIBA World Cup not far from his native France, Rudy Gobert is making strides and should see the role formerly occupied by Derrick Favors from a couple of years ago. He may never get his free throw percentage above 70%, and is unlikely to ever develop range outside of 10-12 feet, but his instincts and surprising speed for his size, coupled with unearthly length, make him a terror in the paint already, even in short, foul-filled stints.

He’s also a bit of a hot head who was raised around the game of basketball and possesses that intense desire to win that cannot be taught. If all the Jazz get from this near-second-rounder is a more athletic Mark Eaton with better hands and more passion, it’s still a steal. We should see plenty of electric play and scintillating rejections from the Stifle Tower this season, if his minutes are somewhat limited due to foul trouble.

Exum: Boom or bust?

The number five pick in the 2014 NBA draft, Aussie Dante Exum, barely saw action before the Boomers were sent packing by Emir Preldzic in an icy display in the first knockout round of the FIBA Cup, which frustrated Jazz fans to no end.  But the Australian National Team’s goals were not those of Exum’s NBA counterpart.

Unlike the Boomers, who were trying to win now, the Jazz realize they were drafting a future talent, not a play now piece. Still, I expect we’ll see plenty of Exum versus second and third unit point guards this season as Snyder eases him into the game at it’s highest level. At barely 19, there’s no reason to rush at this point. Panic and outrage over his playing time and role is largely irrelevant at this juncture as he’s still essentially learning the game.

Be excited for his future.

RODNEY HOOD, MAN!

You’ll regret not remembering Rodney Hood later. There’s so much young talent packed into this Utah Jazz roster it’s easy to overlook a second-string rookie small forward taken late in round one. Often hidden behind the hype of Duke teammate Jabari Parker, Hood may well be more NBA ready than Parker at this point.

The Meridian, Mississippi native has the tools for:

• Deadly three shooting that will be immediately respected by NBA defenses

• Ability to handle the ball in traffic

• Can pass as well as many veteran players and sees the floor like one

• Athletic ability and speed to get to the rim and finish

• Length and desire to defend

Rodney Hood could well become the steal of the 2014 NBA Draft as he develops and gains experience.