SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Jazz are trying to keep things interesting as the NBA’s suspension of the regular season wears on.
While holding virtual group workouts and regular team meetings via Zoom does the trick on some days, there are other days in which head coach Quin Snyder has decided the team needs a little bit more of a boost.
“He’s been able to keep the engagement and the connectivity of the team even though the team is separate right now,” Jazz executive vice president of basketball operations Dennis Lindsey said on Tuesday. “It’s a good time for our players to listen to Quin as the leader of the group. Quin’s had cute ideas like the cookbook and we had (Sen.) Mitt Romney speak to the team a few days earlier. That was amazing.”
While management and the rest of the Jazz front office has also had to shift the way they do business and carry on with plans for the draft and what they hope is the rest of the NBA season and playoffs, Lindsey said that keeping the players engaged has been a bigger priority because the NBA hiatus has shaken up their lives more than others in the organization.
“Frankly it’s a bigger adjustment for the coaches and players, he said. “They’re so regimented from practice, to shootarounds, to games, to flights, to hotels that the bigger adjustment has been for them.”
Evaluating the state of the team
Even with the NBA season on hold and the possibility looming that the season could be canceled, the Jazz front office has been working diligently evaluating its current team.
“We’ve been evaluating units, evaluating individuals inside the units to see what we can carry forward,” Lindsey said.
That kind of evaluation is of course necessary and valuable when heading into the draft and free agency (whenever those may happen), but it’s also useful if the NBA is able to resume at some point.
“I was really excited about the chemistry that we were getting with our second unit that Quin had found with Mike Conley, Jordan Clarkson, Joe Ingles, Georges Niang and Tony Bradley,” Lindsey said. “That group was showing very serious chops offensively. We really liked how they were playing together and I think we were finding ourself with that second unit.”
If the Jazz are able to play postseason basketball, having at least three rotational players from the bench that can be trusted in staggered lineups during the playoffs is absolutely necessary. In watching film and analyzing data from within those units the Jazz could be able to capitalize on the data gathered if and when the NBA gives teams the green light to prepare for games.