Dalton Knecht’s hot streak makes the Jazz’s defensive urgency problem clear

Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 124-118 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.

1. Dalton Knecht threes, and the Jazz’s defensive urgency problem

Dalton Knecht scored 37 points tonight, including 9-12 from the 3-point line. The worst part of the game came at the end of the third quarter, when Knecht made four straight threes, then fouled the next one and then the next one. He scored 18 points in 3 minutes and 3 seconds.

“In the second half, it seemed like everyone in the gym knew Dalton Knecht was going to make the next shot, except for a few people. The problem was those few people were on our team,” Will Hardy said.

It goes without saying that this is quite unacceptable. It’s not new for the Jazz, either: You may remember essentially the same thing that took place in the Jazz’s games against Keegan Murray and Donte DiVincenzo last year.

Watching the film, the primary issue here was someone who wasn’t on the team last year. Cody Williams drew the Knecht assignment during that stretch and simply didn’t treat the shooting threat with the urgency it deserved.

Williams’ rookie status makes this a bit less problematic, though it’s worth noting that the Jazz drafted Williams at least in part believing he could be a plus defender, and so far in his career. Maybe this will be a lesson that pushes him in the right direction.

My biggest problem is how little jazz thinks together as a group. In such a situation, there simply needs to be a collective recognition of what is going on on the floor, and then an understanding of how to stop it. But the Jazz don’t really have a defensive leader or defensive leadership on this team, certainly not while Walker Kessler is out. No one really thinks about “how do we as a group defend what the Lakers are doing right now?” Instead, the players seem much more focused on playing their own roles well.

We’ll see if it develops over time. Clearly, the five men who were on the floor together when the Knecht explosion occurred will not be on the floor together on the next great Jazz team. But all five can stand to improve their own role and to work with others and these could be transferable skills.

2. Breakdown of turnover

The Jazz are obviously a bad team, but it’s not so much that they are the very worst team in the NBA. 3-point shooting? They are only 25! help? 25th! Defensive rebounding? 26th!

One thing they are worst at in the league, however, is turnover. They are dead last, and to a great extent they turn the ball over more than 18.6 times per game. game, significantly more than even the second-worst team, the Portland Trail Blazers (16.9 times). The Jazz only had 16 tonight, but 11 of those came in the first half, and were a big part of why this one was never really close.

So what happens? Well, PBPStats.com uses the NBA’s play-by-play to categorize bad turnovers. Here’s where they stand in each category, as well as where it ranks in the NBA’s hierarchy.

I don’t know that I have good news here: It turns out that the Jazz are among the worst teams in the league in all kinds of turnovers. It’s not just live turnovers that are killing them, they’ve also figured out how to give the ball to the other team with the clock stopped. They often lose the ball just by dribbling it, but they also lose the ball by passing it. They step out of bounds. Heck, they even have offensive goaltending more than most teams.

Where do you begin to solve this problem? No idea.

3. Will Hardy and JJ Redick

Lakers coach JJ Redick ended his pregame press conference in exceptional fashion tonight.

“I’m excited because it’s my first time training against Will Hardy,” Redick said. “So I want to beat his a**.”

Naturally, with Hardy’s press conference just minutes later, we had to ask.

“Yes, I’ve gotten to know JJ over the last few years. We have a lot in common. I always appreciated his general attitude, how he did his job. I admired him when he played, how he did his job as a player. You know, I grew up in Virginia and ACC basketball was pretty much all we saw. So I got to see JJ play a lot when he was at Duke and I have like admired how he has walked his journey as player.”

“And after getting to know him the last couple of years, it’s been a lot more about basketball, the X’s and the O’s, and so I’ve appreciated picking his brain and we’ve had a lot of great fun just talking about playing the game, whether it’s tactics in attack, defense, things like that,” Hardy continued. “His competitiveness is very evident. His tone stinks, but I’ll talk to him about that later. I wasn’t going to say anything stupid about him today. I wouldn’t stoop to his level.”

I’ll be honest, I was pretty impressed with Redick and the Lakers’ coaching staff when I watched this game tonight: they run their offense with a level of connectedness that wasn’t present in the Darvin Ham era. This was my favorite game, I think:

Getting Markkanen on the rim (so he can’t help anything), then getting the ball in the hands of your best passer, then having Anthony Davis fake a screen roll to the hoop for a potential lob while simultaneously running Knecht to the corner off a screen for a three? The defense has to make so many choices here and it just can’t defend everything.

These are good things. I’m on the record as being anti-Lakers… but it’s just a cool game.

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