Being great at something in professional sports usually pops off the screen; breakaway speed, a massive tackle, leaping ability or a gargantuan home run.
Typically, greatness isn’t ambiguous. Sports are very rarely akin to an accountant who finds the majority of write-offs, or the lawyer with the 90-plus percent conviction rate, or the construction site foreman who always stays on schedule — but the Utah Jazz are.
Ricky Rubio, Rudy Gobert, Jae Crowder, Joe Ingles and Donovan Mitchell led the way to a dismissal of the Minnesota Timberwolves 121-97 on Easter Sunday not by bludgeoning their opponent at Target Center but by consciously implementing a blue-collar level of execution.
Sunday was but the latest example of how the Jazz concede perfection in the name of aggregated effectiveness.
Utah doesn’t shut people down on defense — that is impossible in basketball. However, their actions — more so than any team in the NBA — come with the distinct sensation of discomfort.
Gifted with the presence of Rudy Gobert at the back line, Utah’s wings are empowered to irritate. Catching the ball is never an easy task against them and even once the ball is secured Rubio and Mitchell make ball possession uncomfortable.
This polarizes a Minnesota defensive possession that focuses on individual matchup and role; Tom Thibodeau’s system rarely leaves room for improvisation. In turn, Thibodeau’s players seem to operate in absolutes. Being in a passing lane isn’t enough, they want to steal it. Rather than hindering a shot, they want to block it.
In a league with ever-growing offensive effectiveness, these absolutes can lead to futility. Utah knows this, and in response, opts to be content with hindrance rather than the impossible goal of elimination.
Gobert is the key. He unlocks the freedom of Utah’s wings with his presence. Here, against Phoenix, Rubio’s man — Elfrid Payton — has Rubio beat by multiple steps yet he almost waits for Rubio to catch up, simply so Gobert will go away. Rubio can then play with an ultra aggression that in turn forces Payton to dribble the ball out of bounds.
Gobert buys his teammates time. This is something Karl-Anthony Towns has not figured out how to do. While Towns may join Gobert in the top-10 of blocks per game, he does little else in the way of being a defensive hindrance — particularly in the “buying of time” facet of the game.
Here, against Philadelphia, Towns is focused on his man (Ersan Ilyasova) while a Joel Embiid-JJ Redick handoff is taking place. Had Towns been keen on both the ball and his man — as Gobert was against Phoenix — he could have bought time for Taj Gibson to recover to Embiid.
This goes back to the hyper-focus of individual job in the Thibs system. In Towns’ defense, he is defending a noted long-range specialist in Ilyasova and is thus concerned about sacrificing space for an open look.
However, when Gibson falls a step behind Embiid — as Rubio did with Payton — Towns is not there to assist. Because breakdowns in the Minnesota system come with little support, the result is unencumbered looks — like the Embiid flush.
It’s not so much that Utah makes their opponent’s life hell in the way a full-court press does in youth basketball, instead, life is just uncomfortable.
Utah’s Defensive Surge
Since Jan. 22, Utah has rattled off 25 wins in 30 games. It’s a winning percentage only usurped by the Houston Rockets — who have won 29 of their past 32 — in that time frame. In those 32 games, the Rockets are outscoring their opponent’s by a towering 10.6 points per 100 possessions. They do this by literally having the most efficient offense in NBA history.
Their differential suggests many things: Games are likely to be blowouts, James Harden is likely to be the league’s Most Valuable Player, Houston is likely to finish with one of the best season-long win totals in NBA history. Some are going so far as to say that the Rockets are an NBA Finals favorite, even with the lurking juggernaut in the Bay Area.
But the Jazz have an even better point differential than the Rockets since Jan. 22.
That’s not the craziest part. The craziness is that Quin Snyder’s squad is winning these games with what is a definitively average offense. At 107.5 points scored per 100 possessions, the Jazz are the league’s 15th-best offense in this stretch.
They sit behind lottery-bound teams the likes of the Charlotte Hornets and Los Angeles Lakers in offensive efficiency, and they have tallied a whopping 3.5 fewer points per 100 possessions than the Timberwolves — who have lost more games (17) than they have won (14) in that stretch.
Much like the Rockets have been gassed up by one of the most prolific offenses of all-time, the Jazz are functioning just as effectively through the workings of a stringent defense. By inversion, Utah has repopularized the small-ball Death Lineup.
Behind that Rubio-Gobert-Crowder-Ingles-Mitchell quintet, the Jazz have surrendered a scary 88.2 points per 100 possessions, per NBA.com/stats — and those numbers come before the shellacking they placed on the Wolves Sunday.
With Crowder and Ingles alongside Rubio and Mitchell, the Jazz have four ballhawks that can hold their own even if they are forced to switch. Because of this, blow-bys come at a minimum — allowing Gobert to stay in position.
Crowder is particularly a weapon here. Again, against Phoenix, you can see the seamless shift of Crowder — who amalgamates from a power forward defending the 7’1″ Dragan Bender into a power wing able to stay with the 6’6″ Devin Booker. Crowder goes from an upright position when defending Bender into a deep squat that dares Booker to penetrate.
Crowder is a special player who can defensively both function as a big and a power wing. The closest thing the Wolves have to that type of player is Jimmy Butler and Taj Gibson. Yet, here, both Butler and Gibson are involved in a handoff that renders their skillsets useless.
This play from the first meeting against the Jazz breaks down because of Butler. Gibson is anticipating Butler to ICE off his man (Rodney Hood) away from the big. ICE is a staple of the Thibodeau defensive system used to force the ball-handler away from the screen and towards the sideline.
Here is a successful ICE:
Because Butler doesn’t ICE, Gibson is left an extra step back and a step lateral from Hood who does, in fact, use the screen. Hood — who shot 39 percent from 3 while in Utah — is then left with a very lightly contested look.
Had Gibson simply been allowed the freedom to weaponize himself as a big who can attack Hood on the screen — like Crowder is allowed to do — this play has a different result.
It’s not that the ICE-ing system is flawed — ICE has long been a foundational piece of pick-and-roll defense. The flaw lies in the rigidity of the plan. Again, there is a level of freedom in the Utah defense that does not exist in Minnesota. A freedom created by the knowledge of Gobert being at the back line — not Towns.
Gobert Versus Towns At The Rim
While Gobert does provide value through fostering a sense of security to his wings, his greatest value comes through his individual rim defense. While both Kristaps Porzingis and Anthony Davis provide more blocks on a per game basis than Gobert, he makes up for it in general deterrence.
Gobert racks up the blocks, but the amount of shots he impacts without fouling is arguably more meaningful. Here, in the same possession, Gobert forces James Harden to pass and erases the field goal attempt by Nene.
In the scramble for the loose ball — while still on the same possession — all of the Utah players are pulled out of position, except for Gobert. In what turns out to be a transition attempt, Gobert is able to employ a third element of rim defense: shot contention without blocking the shot, or fouling.
This is something Towns has not been able to reenact. Broken record: With Towns, it is often a blocked shot or nothing.
Every block he does connect with almost feels like it comes with the baggage of five more swings and a miss. If a baseball player hits a home run once in every ten at-bats, he is an All-Star. In NBA rim defense, you’re a sieve if the other possessions are strikeouts.
To Towns’ credit, some of the over-pursuit has dissipated. He has even tried to hit a couple singles here and there. But even those verticalities and charge attempts just ring false in their discombobulation.
Gobert is an unfair standard to be held to, but the difference between the two young centers on the defensive end is immense.
Lacking A Balanced Attack
The Jazz don’t pop off your screen but at the end of the day, they win. This isn’t some cute winning streak — it’s not a phase.
And given the fact that the Jazz’s starting lineup includes Ricky “Broke Jumper” Rubio, Jae “RPM Is Fake” Crowder, and Rudy “One Dimensional” Gobert, I think it is pretty safe to say that defense is the reason that the Utah Jazz can come into Target Center for what was being billed as the Wolves biggest game since 2004 and wipe the floor.
It is the defensive side of the ball that gave the Wolves no chance in that matchup. Minnesota’s defense is everything Utah’s isn’t. The Jazz employ a strategy of minimizing their own mistakes on defense so as to increase the odds that the opposing offense draws a blank.
Their goal is making the shot taken to be 10 percent worse than it would be against a typical opponent. They don’t operate in the absolutes of steals and blocks because their genius is found on the margins.
That concept is hard for Andrew Wiggins, Karl-Anthony Towns and crew. Whether it is their youth, AAU upbringing, or general thick skulled-ness, there is little sense of these principles resonating.
January, February, and March have continued a trend of below-average defense for the Wolves — which leaves the Wolves with the 27th-ranked defense in the NBA.
The seven teams immediately above the Wolves in defensive rating (Chicago, Brooklyn, New York, Atlanta, Orlando, Memphis, Dallas) have all — to varying degrees — been self-sabotaging themselves so as to literally increase their opponent’s odds of scoring more points on them. (Except for Brooklyn, they are still in the hangover phase of previous self-sabotage.)
It’s wild, really. How can a team desperately scraping for the playoffs not put together even a semblance of prolonged defensive effectiveness? Nine of the Wolves past 27 games have been against one of the aforementioned tanking teams or Sacramento — who is one of the three teams with a worse defense than Minnesota.
Despite playing a third of their games against those self-saboteurs, the Wolves have sunk their defensive rating deeper. In those 27 games, the Wolves defensive rating is 111.0 compared to 107.7 prior to that. So, yes, it’s getting worse.
Sure, there has been no Butler for 16 of those 27 games, but is it okay to function worse than any defense has in the past eight years? The last time a team had a defensive rating worse than 111.0 for a season was the Washington Wizards and Sacramento Kings who both achieved the feat in the 2008-09 season on their way to combine for 36 total wins.
The matchup against Utah on Sunday night reared a prevailing narrative of defensive ineptitude that when juxtaposed upon Utah’s pedigree is nothing short of disappointing.
For a Minnesota franchise that is in serious jeopardy of losing what was supposed to be the season that broke the playoff drought, Sunday rang the bell of what is a scary reminder: The Wolves have been patently awful at defense for two years.
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