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Brice Sensabaugh scored a career-high 43 points against the Chicago Bulls on Wednesday night.
The hot night was obviously an outlier for Sensabaugh, who, prior to that game, was averaging 10.1 points per game on the season with 21 double-digit outings and a previous career high of 34. Although an outlier, it doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been significant work done over the course of his three years in the NBA to get him to this point.
Like so many of his young Utah Jazz counterparts, Sensabaugh was working through his rookie season just trying to find his place within the Jazz and NBA.
“It starts off with trying to help any young player fit into the ecosystem of your team,” Jazz coach Will Hardy said. “Because when you’re trying to earn credibility as a young player, the first thing you have to do is earn credibility (with) your teammates. So it was more about trying to create an environment where Brice could fit in with the rest of the group.”
Hardy doesn’t want rookies coming to the Jazz burdened with the pressure of producing in a certain way. For example, Sensabaugh has always been known as a natural scorer, but Hardy did not want him to believe that scoring was the only way that he would earn time with the Jazz.
Instead, he wanted Sensabaugh’s perspective to shift to believing that even if the scoring is not happening, if he played within the system and did the right things, was in the right places, understood the concepts behind the Jazz’s schemes, that he would earn time.
Then, last season, the coaching staff started to add more catch-and-shoot development and niche work to Sensabaugh’s plate.
“Brice can really shoot the ball, but he needed to work a little bit on the speed of the assembly of his base so that his release would be quicker without having to try to make his hands faster where he feels rushed,” Hardy said. “I thought he did a really good job of that last year. And this year, we’ve tried to put him in some situations where he’s handling a little bit more.”
Ultimately, it’s defensively where Sensabaugh puts in the most work. The scoring stuff is natural and improving small technical things is inevitable and comes easier. But in order for him to be valued and be able to stay on the court, he knows that he has to become at least a neutral defender. And if he wants to be a player that is relied on to be on the court for important moments later in his career, he needs to be a positive defender.
As for the 43-point night, Hardy is not willing to take all or even most of the credit for development playing a major role in someone having a hot hand.
“There’s 25 of the 43 points had nothing to do with me or anything that we’re trying to put him in,” Hardy said. “He got in a really good flow, his teammates found him at the right times, he took advantage of some matchups in different moments and he also made like five amazing shots.”
But there is a larger philosophical approach at work with Sensabaugh that also applies to all of the Jazz’s young players. Hardy believes in making players rely on one another and playing for one another before focusing their efforts to individual strengths. That doesn’t mean completely ignoring individual development early on. It just means that the priority is about fitting in.
“There’s like a layering that you want to do with any young player,” Hardy said. “You don’t want to throw it all at them at once, and sometimes that means stripping things back early, even if there’s things they can already maybe do a little bit of. Because if we turn the whole team into we’re doing what’s best for each person’s development when we take the court, it would be very disjointed.”
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