A lesson for Collin Sexton: ‘Anybody but Jrue’ Holiday

Late in the fourth quarter of the Utah Jazz’s loss to the Boston Celtics on Tuesday night, Jazz head coach Will Hardy subbed out Collin Sexton for the sole purpose of talking to him about a decision Sexton had just made.

That decision? Calling for a screen that would make Celtics guard Jrue Holiday the on-ball defender.

When the Jazz’s offensive possession began, with five minutes left on the game clock, Sexton was being guarded by Xavier Tillman, which is a matchup the Jazz like for Sexton being able to penetrate and use his speed.

Instead of using that or even moving to the left side of the court, however, Sexton called for John Collins to come from the right wing to screen, creating a switch that put Holiday on the ball.

“A lot of times against the Celtics, there’s not a lot of great choices, but there are better choices,” Hardy said after the game. “Collin had an iso against Tillman, and we ended up running a screener up that’s being guarded by Jrue Holliday and we’re basically just putting the best defender in the gym on Collin.”

To Sexton’s credit, he called for a second screen to get Holiday off the ball and bring Tillman back into the play, but by that point there were only seven seconds left on the shot clock, so Sexton had to make a quick decision and ended up shooting a 3-pointer over the top of the much taller Tillman.

Sexton made the shot, which Hardy acknowledged, but he wanted to make sure Sexton was not going to make the mistake of having the ball in his hands and calling for an action that would bring over the opposing team’s best defender.

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“I just said, ‘Hey, for the rest of our lives together, anybody but Jrue,’” Hardy said.

After a few quick words, Hardy immediately put Sexton back in the game. He just wanted to get his point across.

As the 12th team in the 15-team Western Conference standings, the Jazz losing to the NBA-best Celtics was an unsurprising result on Tuesday.

That being said, the Jazz stayed close for most of the night, but the start of the fourth quarter included a stagnant offensive stretch for the Jazz as they went seven minutes without scoring a single point.

During that stretch, Hardy noticed there were decisions being made that ignored matchups and weaknesses in the Celtics defense that his team could have capitalized on, much like this play involving Sexton.

That doesn’t mean Sexton deserves all the blame or that he was the reason the Jazz lost — there’s a lot of blame to go around — but it illustrates a larger issue that Hardy is trying to hammer home during this final stretch of the season.

Hardy wants the players to think as a unit, and the fact that Collins didn’t recognize the problem in the moment and that there wasn’t a concerted effort to take Holiday as far away from the ball as possible means there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.