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Ryan McDonald
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SALT LAKE CITY — There’s a general assumption out there, Quin Snyder surmised, that NBA teams will be able to essentially pick up where they left off four months ago as the league restarts this month in Orlando.
On Saturday, however, the Utah Jazz’s head coach was rather quick to say that won’t exactly be the case for his group. Yes, by all accounts over the past few days since the Jazz have begun practicing, players are in shape and they remember how to execute the plays in Snyder’s system.
The thing is, though, some of those plays will have a different look to them than they did before the hiatus, and some might not be run at all, as the Jazz will be without second-leading scorer Bojan Bogdanovic, who underwent surgery on his right wrist in May and will miss the rest of the season.
“We lost Bojan, so our team’s different,” Snyder succinctly said Saturday via Zoom.
In trying to compensate for Bogdanovic’s absence, Snyder said, other guys will at times be counted on to step directly into the Croatian’s role, but at other times, things will be modified to better fit the strengths of the players who are available.
“I think a little bit of both,” Snyder said. “There’s certain plays, really, because of Bojan’s height and his ability to shoot, that are really Bojan specific.”
That said, players such as Royce O’Neale, Georges Niang (who hasn’t yet gone through a full practice in Orlando because of left ankle soreness) and Joe Ingles should be able to fill the gaps when it comes to the some of catch-and-shoot plays Bogdanovic is so effective in. On the other hand, players such as Donovan Mitchell, Mike Conley and Jordan Clarkson can attack off the dribble, but do so in a different way than Bogdanovic would, so things might have to be tweaked.
When asked Friday how the team would look without Bogdanovic, Ingles, in typical fashion, deadpanned, “We just won’t have Bojan on the court,” but more seriously, he added, “We’ll have to make adjustments in some of the stuff we run. Some of the stuff we ran for him we can run for other guys on our team. We’ll have someone like Mike to have the ball more and he’ll be able to do what he’s done his whole career.”
To Ingles’ first point, Snyder said Saturday that he feels if too much gets changed, that could end up doing more harm than good.
“It’s a balance because one player may be different — Jordan may be different, say, than Bojan — but he impacts the other guys on the court,” Snyder said, “so it’s a question of Donovan (for example) adjusting to not having Bojan as much as it is our staff.”
O’Neale said Saturday that indeed some things have changed because Bogdanovic isn’t there, but he feels that Snyder has a good handle on what adjustments need to be made.
“Missing Bojan, having to adjust the way we play, our style, I think Coach is adapting in a way that helps us out to play more freely but still have a lot of structure and the way he wants us to play,” O’Neale said.
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