3. Utah Jazz
In a league that is allegedly going smaller and quicker, Utah has a chance to veer against the grain by going super-big via units featuring Paul Millsap, Derrick Favors, and Al Jefferson. Those three played only 113 regular-season minutes together, mostly late in the season when injuries forced Tyrone Corbin’s hand, and they outscored opponents by nearly 20 points per 100 possessions, per NBA.com’s stats database. That won’t hold over the long haul, even if these units played the Spurs almost exactly even during San Antonio’s first-round whitewashing of Utah. Corbin has already indicated this will be only an occasional change-of-pace tactic, since playing Millsap at small forward exposes him to quicker players and squeezes Utah’s spacing. And it might not be as urgent a need this season, with the acquisition of Marvin Williams, plus internal improvement from Gordon Hayward and Alec Burks, bolstering a wing rotation that was among the very worst in the league last season.
But Favors represents the most likely potential cure for Utah’s diseased defense, which ranked 20th in points allowed per possession, mostly due to Jefferson’s flat-footed non-defense of the pick-and-roll. Favors is a shot-blocking menace, capable of getting from the foul line to the rim in a flash, and Utah needs to play him more if his unsure offense has progressed enough. That’s an important “if.” As much as everyone wants to scream about defense winning championships, Utah made the playoffs mostly thanks to a top-10 offense that sputtered whenever more than one or two starters left the floor. Jefferson is a sieve on defense, but teams don’t get anywhere by solving one problem if the solution creates another. Corbin and his staff have an interesting juggling act to perform.
I’m bullish on Hayward, too. He has solid all-around skills on both ends, and his struggles last season were typical of young players. He was turnover-prone on the pick-and-roll, with a habit of dribbling into crowds, missing easy pocket passes and generally proceeding without a plan. Perhaps as a result, he took too many jumpers on both pick-and-rolls and spot-up chances in which the opportunity to drive by a defender on the close-out was there.
His defense was also uneven. He’d go under screens now and then against good shooters, over-help in the lane at times, or rotate a split second late to a weakside shooter. But the inability of Utah’s big men to hedge on dribble penetration — Millsap, though much better than Jefferson, isn’t blameless — compromised everything, and Hayward showed a solid baseline understanding of NBA responsibilities on both ends. With a little more decisiveness, Hayward should be a player.
And we haven’t even mentioned Enes Kanter, who lost 50 pounds in the offseason, hilariously bungled the worm at a Jazz open scrimmage last week, and literally dropped the mic last season.
