Short answer - No
Long answer
I'll start by saying two things about turnover margin:
1) Turnovers (both forcing and conceding) are a product of performance but maybe more importantly a product of playstyle choices. A team can always perform better with the system they choose, but different strategies will naturally lead to more or less turnovers. So while a higher turnover margin is always better within the same strategy, it's not necessarily better when considering different strategies. For example, a very conservative defensive team who also uses a ton of ball movement (higher potential for turnovers) could be 20th in turnover margin.....but they are not necessarily worse than a team who might be 10th in turnover margin but instead of a conservative defense they play more aggressive looking for turnovers and on offense they don't move the ball, shoot quickly, etc. I think this is proven by the weak correlation to winning. Even though more positive margin is strictly better than less in a vacuum, there isn't a strong correlation because teams are making tradeoffs with the way to play that evens it out.
Side note, I'm glad we can safely use correlations in discussions lol.
2) I think offensive turnovers and defensive turnovers are mutually exclusive for the most part. While I don't think turnover margin is completely useless, it does kind of give into the idea that a team's turnovers can be made up for by forcing turnovers. In reality, I think the tradeoff is different. If there are more/less turnovers on a given side of the ball, I think the tradeoff you'll see is actually in the shooting efficiency. So I'd rather look at the turnover thing as two distinct entities than....it's really not too different than looking at offense and defense as a whole as two different things.
How does this apply to the Jazz?
Defensively, yes I think it's concern that we don't force turnovers, but I'd say our defense has been so bad over the years that pretty much everything is a concern. I'd say that with a big like Walker Kessler, that lends itself to a more conservative system....Let Kessler be a super man defender at the rim and everyone else stay home, just like we did with Gobert. So in that sense, I don't think a conservative strategey is bad....but I do question Hardy's ability as a defensive coach in general. We've had no success and he's openly said it has not been a focus of his in the past. When you're consistently hitting last place it's probably not the result of smart strategy tradeoffs, it's poor performance and probably poor system. I don't think we have great structure on defense and I also think we perform poorly, so yeah....concerned with most aspects of the defense even if a low forced turnover rate is not necessarily bad.
Offensively, I'm not really worried long term. Hardy has proven to have success despite a high turnover system. In his first year hear, we were 4th in offense despite being 25th in TOV rate. To be fair, offensive rebounding was carrying our offensive rating, but still I think this proves that we can have a good offense with the way Hardy likes to play. I think his system lends itself to "killer passes" which is why someone like Lauri has really succeeded, but throwing those dagger passes also naturally leads to more turnovers. I think we both play a style that leads to more turnovers (which is fine) and have poor talent (which hopefully will get better over time)....so I think this problem will resolve itself and I have confidence in Hardy to produce a good offense with reasonable talent. Success will probably look like us being 20th in turnover rate instead of 30th.
