OKLAHOMA CITY — The Utah Jazz were playing without Lauri Markkanen, without Jordan Clarkson, going against the No. 1 team in the Western Conference and trailed by just two points going into the fourth quarter against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday night.
Then Chet Holmgren turned on the turbo boosters, a few Jazz turnovers here, a few missed shots there and the Thunder were able to pull out a 119-107 win.
But Jazz head coach Will Hardy was proud of the way the young Jazz core competed against OKC for the most part. Even the mistakes the Jazz made were ones that will be valuable upon rewatch and are ones that will be important for the young players on this Jazz team to focus in on as they continue to develop.
Secondary defensive fouls
Not all fouls are created equal. As a primary defender, especially when guarding the ball, it’s important to use your hands as well as your body. It’s impossible to not use your hands if you’re hoping to force turnovers, grab steals, change direction of the play, etc.
Using your body to do this is just as important, but there is latitude given to players in the way they use their hands when they are guarding the ball. Some fouls are going to happen because of this.
As a secondary defender it’s so much more important to understand defensive positioning and to not stick your hands into plays unnecessarily, and this is an area that hurt the Jazz on Wednesday night.
“The ones that are tougher for me are the secondary defender getting their hands caught in,” Hardy said. “We’d like to shift and show help with our body and not be late and use our arm.
“The guys on the ball, they do need to use their hands some. You can’t just say put your hands behind your back. It doesn’t work that way, so it’s really the secondary defenders. That’s the part we got to clean up more than anything.”
Here are some examples:
This is something the Jazz can fix. It takes time and a lot of discipline, but the young players will have plenty of that.
Choices at the rim
The Jazz, like all teams, of course prefer shots at the rim and 3-pointers over anything else. But Hardy has made it clear that he isn’t completely opposed to players operating in the midrange, and if it comes down to an ill-advised shot at the rim or something else, Hardy would prefer whatever the best decision is.
That being said, there were some shots at the rim that weren’t really great on Wednesday — shots where a players is reaching and stretching to try to get a shot over some of the longest players on the court, or they are shooting at a bad angle or falling as they are trying to get the ball to the rim.
When there’s a low chance of actually getting the shot to fall, and a player is falling out of bounds, not only do those shots often result in a defensive rebound and a fast break, but it means the other team is running the break ahead of the player that is now on the floor out of bounds and the other team has numbers at that point.
“We had too many plays where we made bad decisions at the rim,” Hardy said. “Those plays at the rim where you’re playing over the top of Chet and sometimes a second defender, those leads to run outs and then we have guys on the ground ...and they have an advantage going back the other way and they’re really hard to guard in transition.”
To that point the Thunder scored 35 fast break points against the Jazz.
Keyonte George finding the right spot
Rookie Keyonte George finished just 3 of 14 from the field on Wednesday. I asked Hardy if he liked George’s shot selection.
“Not really,” Hardy said. “I feel like they were putting high level defenders on him. They had Lu Dort on him for a while and that’s exhausting.
“His mix of physicality and footwork and intelligence defensively is rare, and I thought that Keyonte got caught in between too many times where I think he saw the pass, but he maybe saw it a half a dribble late and then just sort of got caught taking some tough, forced shots.”
Even though Hardy would have liked for George not to take some of those shots, he was looking forward to George seeing the film and being able to learn from this. Learning the tendencies of NBA personnel takes a lot of time and it’s one of the biggest hurdles for young NBA players.
George was visibly frustrated after the game, and in the locker room guard Kris Dunn was trying to give George some pointers on how to better get himself in a good position against some of the Thunder’s defenders. But more than anything Dunn was letting George know that one game is not the end of the world or a reason to doubt his abilities.
“It’s a long season,” Dunn said. “There’s ups and downs to it. No one is perfect. You just got to stay mentally strong, keep doing the right things, keep putting the work in and watching film, being a great teammate when things are not going your way and keep your head up.”