The Utah Jazz are legitimate NBA title contenders. Here’s how it happened由asjkfj 发表在翻译团招工部 https://bbs.hupu.com/fyt-store
Utah moved to 22-5 on the season, and capped a week where it defeated the Heat, Indiana Pacers, Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks — basically, a who’s who of the Eastern Conference. The Jazz have won 18 of their last 19 games, as they prepare for Monday night’s mega-matchup against MVP candidate Joel Embiid and the Philadelphia 76ers. They have the top record in the Western Conference and lead what is becoming an intriguing arms race between them, the Los Angeles Lakers and the LA Clippers.
Simply put, the Utah Jazz are the talk of the league.
But how?
Where did this dominance come from? On the surface, the adage persists that a team that can rest in the top 10 of the league offensively and defensively has a chance to win a lot of basketball games. The Jazz are top-five in both. Offensively, they can shoot you out of the gym. Defensively, they squeeze you like a boa constrictor. They are 11 deep with legit rotation players. Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert are All-Stars and All-NBA candidates. Mike Conley, Bojan Bogdanovic and Joe Ingles are elite veteran role players, with Conley having an All-Star argument in his own right. Jordan Clarkson would be the runaway Sixth Man of the Year if the season ended today. The Jazz are versatile, they are capable of beating you in a number of different ways, and they are, at the very least, an NBA title contender.
“People think we win games because we hit a lot of threes,” Utah center Derrick Favors told The Athletic. “The reason we win games is because of how we defend. The defense sustains us when things aren’t going well offensively, until we can hit some shots.”
Before the season, opinion on the Jazz varied. Many thought they had a chance to be good — very good, even. Some thought the Jazz would have a tough time making the playoffs, as the rest of the Western Conference improved around them. Most thought the Jazz would be a postseason team, and a first-round out somewhere as a No. 4-7 seed. You know, the status quo for them.
Going deeper, nobody foresaw this. Except for maybe the Jazz themselves. While the rest of the league talked, the Jazz themselves stayed quiet. Utah went out in the first round of the postseason in the bubble, but privately, the Jazz didn’t think they were far away. A healed injury here, a free agency signing there and internal improvement everywhere has led to the best start in franchise history.
“I just wish you guys had been there to see us during our offseason workouts,” Mitchell said. “Everyone worked their behinds off because we knew what we had a chance to be. Whatever guys had to do in workouts, that’s what guys did.”
The result is a team drawing accolades from around the league. The top of the NBA is littered with the usual suspects. The Lakers look dominant. The Brooklyn Nets with their superstar trio promise to be around at the end. The Clippers are as good as advertised. The Bucks — a loss to the Jazz notwithstanding — are playing good basketball.
Utah, however, has been a surprise. They are the team that’s crashed the party. They are the uninvited guests. The ball movement. The shooting. The ability to defend. The depth. It’s all drawing comparisons to great teams of yesteryear.
“They are so difficult to defend because they have answers to every coverage you throw at them,” Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens said. “They’ve got excellent one-on-one players in Mitchell, Bogdanovic and Clarkson, and then they’ve just got a ton of guys that shoot it, move it, or drive it. I think it’s the closest team to the 2014 San Antonio Spurs that we’ve played, the way the ball moves and how quickly the right decision is made. The ball doesn’t stick.”
It’s understandable to think the Jazz suddenly emerged as an elite team. In reality, this was a slow boil. Even throughout the early Quin Snyder seasons, when the Jazz were anything but an elite bunch. The on-court product has been years in the making, in truth. And it’s a roster that not only came together on the floor but also in the boardrooms where decisions were made.
The beginning
Obvious unselfishness.
Favors still hears those words, sometimes in his sleep. Ingles as well.
Considering what the Jazz are today — a team that can hurt you in so many different ways, with so many different players — it’s fitting that those were the words Snyder uttered from the very first practice in 2104.
“When Quin got there, there was a changing of the culture,” Favors said. “The previous culture was Ty Corbin and Jerry Sloan. And that was a great culture. But Quin brought a fresh new energy into the players and the franchise and the locker room. As players, we all fed off of it in a positive way. Quin laid down the foundation and said this is how we’re going to build. We wanted to share the ball. We wanted to establish pace and we always wanted to attack the rim.”
Realistically, the Jazz brass knew they wouldn’t have a contending team for quite some time. The Spurs were finishing their incredible run over multiple decades. The Golden State Warriors were on the verge of a breakthrough, and indeed, they would go on to win multiple titles. LeBron James crossing to the Western Conference to win a title with the Los Angeles Lakers wasn’t on the horizon in 2014. At the same time, the Jazz knew they had to play a long game.
But the culture — the foundation — that could be established right away.
So, Snyder mouthed those two words early on.
Obvious unselfishness.
It’s an all-encompassing phrase that covered both ends of the floor. Offensively, make the extra pass. Make the extra read. Sacrifice a good shot for yourself to get a great shot for your teammate. Defensively, help your teammate when he gets beat off the dribble. Make the extra rotation. And for the love of all things good, run your guy off the 3-point line and funnel him towards No. 27. Rumor has it, he’s a good defender in the paint.
“You could tell from the beginning what Quin was looking to build,” Ingles said. “There was always an emphasis on defending and playing the game the right way. The guys that were there from the beginning, we all carry those principals to this day.”
The first few years were rough in some ways, enlightening in others. What Jazz fan in the house that night forgets Snyder screaming “Wake up!” at his team playing lethargic basketball early in the first season? What Jazz fan doesn’t look fondly on the Twitter gif of Snyder, unhappy on the bench, snarling while he slowly turns his head?
Utah had a losing record in Snyder’s first few years. But that doesn’t mean progress wasn’t being made. Guys who didn’t buy into the system, who either didn’t commit to defending or didn’t commit to moving the basketball, were shipped out. Snyder yearned to play a more perimeter style of basketball, but with Gobert and Favors, he played the way his personnel dictated. Soon, the Jazz established themselves as one of the best defensive teams in basketball.
Upstairs
Meanwhile, the Jazz brain trust — Dennis Lindsey, Justin Zanik and David Morway — tinkered with the roster like mad scientists looking for the perfect mix.
Gordon Hayward was supposed to be the franchise offensive player, but he left for the Boston Celtics in free agency as he was hitting the prime of his career. There were impressive finds from an organizational perspective. Discovering Gobert and Mitchell, that was expert drafting and scouting. Those guys didn’t fall into Utah’s lap. The Jazz zeroed in on both pre-draft and went and got them. Ingles and Royce O’Neale? There’s a question as to whether they are even in the league if Utah didn’t give them a chance.
There were draft misses. Dante Exum was Utah’s lone top-five pick of the Lindsey era, and he simply didn’t work out. The Jazz drafted Trey Lyles over Devin Booker, and that was a miss. But, ironically, the Jazz turned those misses into two of the biggest hits of the decade. Lyles was traded to the Denver Nuggets for the right to draft Mitchell. Exum was turned into Clarkson. And there was a consistent search for a dynamic point guard when Exum didn’t pop that included George Hill and Ricky Rubio.
What the Jazz wanted was a perfect mix of what they became defensively, and what they wanted to become offensively. That proved to be difficult. Two years ago, when Utah lost to the Houston Rockets in five games, the front office watched from the Toyota Center and realized this was a roster that could defend, a roster with toughness, but a roster with a hard ceiling offensively.
So the franchise pivoted. The Jazz traded for Conley. They signed Bogdanovic in free agency, which has proven to be a heist. But they had to trade Jae Crowder and let Favors go in the process.
“Those early years, we weren’t going to space the floor,” Snyder said. “We needed to move the ball and grind through a possession. We were like a football team that runs the ball. And hopefully, in the fourth quarter, we would wear you down through great defense. We weren’t a pace and space team.”
The Jazz wanted to be a pace and space team. The question was about finding balance. How were they going to be able to find the needed shooting and scoring acumen that needed to be accrued around Mitchell, without sacrificing the other side of the basketball? By this time, Utah had become a good team. They were a playoff team in three consecutive seasons. In two of those years as a No. 5 seed, they beat the Los Angeles Clippers and Oklahoma City Thunder, before getting smoked by the Golden State Warriors and Rockets, respectively.
Becoming a good team wasn’t the hardest thing to do. That was all about defending, developing talent from within and finding a star in Hayward and then Mitchell. Becoming great? That was harder than anyone imagined.
The ultimate leap
“I think they are the best team in the Western Conference.”
Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo recently said this about the Jazz, and it’s starting to not look like lip service.
It was hard for the Jazz to make this step. They were still really good. Utah went 44-28 last season. The Jazz were deadly offensively by the end of the season and should’ve beaten the Nuggets in the first round, surrendering a 3-1 series lead. But, the roster wasn’t right. For the first time in forever, the Jazz were quite vulnerable defensively. Free agency acquisitions Jeff Green and Ed Davis didn’t work out. Conley’s acclimation to the roster went longer than anyone expected.
In hindsight, the Jazz knew they overcorrected themselves and went from a team that couldn’t score enough to a team that couldn’t generate enough defensive stops. That’s why they zeroed in on Favors. They knew getting him back would tie their rotation together in a way that couldn’t be quantified on paper. It was almost hilarious that a sizable portion of prognosticators dismissed his signing as one that wasn’t significant.
But Favors has done a few things for the Jazz. His addition allowed Gobert to expend more energy defensively without fear of fouling, knowing that Favors is a starting-caliber center who just happens to be coming off the bench. It’s allowed Snyder to play Favors against starting centers in the back half of quarters, which allows Gobert to play against second units, giving the Jazz a big advantage nightly.
“I think everyone has come into this season with a mindset of sacrificing,” Favors said. “And that’s how it’s working. This is an unselfish team. It doesn’t matter who scores. We’ve built the culture here and we know how fun it is to play this way.”
Mitchell credits the bubble as a turning point. That’s where the Jazz galvanized as a unit. It’s where he and Gobert settled their differences. Whatever their personal relationship is, and it’s clearly irrelevant now, they plainly play for one another on the floor. More importantly, they realized they needed each other professionally, something that took maturity and self-awareness on the parts of both men.
Gobert needs Mitchell’s ability to create offensively. Mitchell needs Gobert’s ability to be a one-man wrecking ball defensively. Both are playing at career levels.
The Jazz aren’t shying away from their desire to compete at the highest levels. “We want to be the best team in July, not February,” is how Mitchell puts it. But there’s no denying they have made the leap beyond being just a good team.
And in the quest for any team to break through a ceiling, making the leap is half the battle.
Utah moved to 22-5 on the season, and capped a week where it defeated the Heat, Indiana Pacers, Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks — basically, a who’s who of the Eastern Conference. The Jazz have won 18 of their last 19 games, as they prepare for Monday night’s mega-matchup against MVP candidate Joel Embiid and the Philadelphia 76ers. They have the top record in the Western Conference and lead what is becoming an intriguing arms race between them, the Los Angeles Lakers and the LA Clippers.
Simply put, the Utah Jazz are the talk of the league.
But how?
Where did this dominance come from? On the surface, the adage persists that a team that can rest in the top 10 of the league offensively and defensively has a chance to win a lot of basketball games. The Jazz are top-five in both. Offensively, they can shoot you out of the gym. Defensively, they squeeze you like a boa constrictor. They are 11 deep with legit rotation players. Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert are All-Stars and All-NBA candidates. Mike Conley, Bojan Bogdanovic and Joe Ingles are elite veteran role players, with Conley having an All-Star argument in his own right. Jordan Clarkson would be the runaway Sixth Man of the Year if the season ended today. The Jazz are versatile, they are capable of beating you in a number of different ways, and they are, at the very least, an NBA title contender.
“People think we win games because we hit a lot of threes,” Utah center Derrick Favors told The Athletic. “The reason we win games is because of how we defend. The defense sustains us when things aren’t going well offensively, until we can hit some shots.”
Before the season, opinion on the Jazz varied. Many thought they had a chance to be good — very good, even. Some thought the Jazz would have a tough time making the playoffs, as the rest of the Western Conference improved around them. Most thought the Jazz would be a postseason team, and a first-round out somewhere as a No. 4-7 seed. You know, the status quo for them.
Going deeper, nobody foresaw this. Except for maybe the Jazz themselves. While the rest of the league talked, the Jazz themselves stayed quiet. Utah went out in the first round of the postseason in the bubble, but privately, the Jazz didn’t think they were far away. A healed injury here, a free agency signing there and internal improvement everywhere has led to the best start in franchise history.
“I just wish you guys had been there to see us during our offseason workouts,” Mitchell said. “Everyone worked their behinds off because we knew what we had a chance to be. Whatever guys had to do in workouts, that’s what guys did.”
The result is a team drawing accolades from around the league. The top of the NBA is littered with the usual suspects. The Lakers look dominant. The Brooklyn Nets with their superstar trio promise to be around at the end. The Clippers are as good as advertised. The Bucks — a loss to the Jazz notwithstanding — are playing good basketball.
Utah, however, has been a surprise. They are the team that’s crashed the party. They are the uninvited guests. The ball movement. The shooting. The ability to defend. The depth. It’s all drawing comparisons to great teams of yesteryear.
“They are so difficult to defend because they have answers to every coverage you throw at them,” Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens said. “They’ve got excellent one-on-one players in Mitchell, Bogdanovic and Clarkson, and then they’ve just got a ton of guys that shoot it, move it, or drive it. I think it’s the closest team to the 2014 San Antonio Spurs that we’ve played, the way the ball moves and how quickly the right decision is made. The ball doesn’t stick.”
It’s understandable to think the Jazz suddenly emerged as an elite team. In reality, this was a slow boil. Even throughout the early Quin Snyder seasons, when the Jazz were anything but an elite bunch. The on-court product has been years in the making, in truth. And it’s a roster that not only came together on the floor but also in the boardrooms where decisions were made.
The beginning
Obvious unselfishness.
Favors still hears those words, sometimes in his sleep. Ingles as well.
Considering what the Jazz are today — a team that can hurt you in so many different ways, with so many different players — it’s fitting that those were the words Snyder uttered from the very first practice in 2104.
“When Quin got there, there was a changing of the culture,” Favors said. “The previous culture was Ty Corbin and Jerry Sloan. And that was a great culture. But Quin brought a fresh new energy into the players and the franchise and the locker room. As players, we all fed off of it in a positive way. Quin laid down the foundation and said this is how we’re going to build. We wanted to share the ball. We wanted to establish pace and we always wanted to attack the rim.”
Realistically, the Jazz brass knew they wouldn’t have a contending team for quite some time. The Spurs were finishing their incredible run over multiple decades. The Golden State Warriors were on the verge of a breakthrough, and indeed, they would go on to win multiple titles. LeBron James crossing to the Western Conference to win a title with the Los Angeles Lakers wasn’t on the horizon in 2014. At the same time, the Jazz knew they had to play a long game.
But the culture — the foundation — that could be established right away.
So, Snyder mouthed those two words early on.
Obvious unselfishness.
It’s an all-encompassing phrase that covered both ends of the floor. Offensively, make the extra pass. Make the extra read. Sacrifice a good shot for yourself to get a great shot for your teammate. Defensively, help your teammate when he gets beat off the dribble. Make the extra rotation. And for the love of all things good, run your guy off the 3-point line and funnel him towards No. 27. Rumor has it, he’s a good defender in the paint.
“You could tell from the beginning what Quin was looking to build,” Ingles said. “There was always an emphasis on defending and playing the game the right way. The guys that were there from the beginning, we all carry those principals to this day.”
The first few years were rough in some ways, enlightening in others. What Jazz fan in the house that night forgets Snyder screaming “Wake up!” at his team playing lethargic basketball early in the first season? What Jazz fan doesn’t look fondly on the Twitter gif of Snyder, unhappy on the bench, snarling while he slowly turns his head?
Utah had a losing record in Snyder’s first few years. But that doesn’t mean progress wasn’t being made. Guys who didn’t buy into the system, who either didn’t commit to defending or didn’t commit to moving the basketball, were shipped out. Snyder yearned to play a more perimeter style of basketball, but with Gobert and Favors, he played the way his personnel dictated. Soon, the Jazz established themselves as one of the best defensive teams in basketball.
Upstairs
Meanwhile, the Jazz brain trust — Dennis Lindsey, Justin Zanik and David Morway — tinkered with the roster like mad scientists looking for the perfect mix.
Gordon Hayward was supposed to be the franchise offensive player, but he left for the Boston Celtics in free agency as he was hitting the prime of his career. There were impressive finds from an organizational perspective. Discovering Gobert and Mitchell, that was expert drafting and scouting. Those guys didn’t fall into Utah’s lap. The Jazz zeroed in on both pre-draft and went and got them. Ingles and Royce O’Neale? There’s a question as to whether they are even in the league if Utah didn’t give them a chance.
There were draft misses. Dante Exum was Utah’s lone top-five pick of the Lindsey era, and he simply didn’t work out. The Jazz drafted Trey Lyles over Devin Booker, and that was a miss. But, ironically, the Jazz turned those misses into two of the biggest hits of the decade. Lyles was traded to the Denver Nuggets for the right to draft Mitchell. Exum was turned into Clarkson. And there was a consistent search for a dynamic point guard when Exum didn’t pop that included George Hill and Ricky Rubio.
What the Jazz wanted was a perfect mix of what they became defensively, and what they wanted to become offensively. That proved to be difficult. Two years ago, when Utah lost to the Houston Rockets in five games, the front office watched from the Toyota Center and realized this was a roster that could defend, a roster with toughness, but a roster with a hard ceiling offensively.
So the franchise pivoted. The Jazz traded for Conley. They signed Bogdanovic in free agency, which has proven to be a heist. But they had to trade Jae Crowder and let Favors go in the process.
“Those early years, we weren’t going to space the floor,” Snyder said. “We needed to move the ball and grind through a possession. We were like a football team that runs the ball. And hopefully, in the fourth quarter, we would wear you down through great defense. We weren’t a pace and space team.”
The Jazz wanted to be a pace and space team. The question was about finding balance. How were they going to be able to find the needed shooting and scoring acumen that needed to be accrued around Mitchell, without sacrificing the other side of the basketball? By this time, Utah had become a good team. They were a playoff team in three consecutive seasons. In two of those years as a No. 5 seed, they beat the Los Angeles Clippers and Oklahoma City Thunder, before getting smoked by the Golden State Warriors and Rockets, respectively.
Becoming a good team wasn’t the hardest thing to do. That was all about defending, developing talent from within and finding a star in Hayward and then Mitchell. Becoming great? That was harder than anyone imagined.
The ultimate leap
“I think they are the best team in the Western Conference.”
Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo recently said this about the Jazz, and it’s starting to not look like lip service.
It was hard for the Jazz to make this step. They were still really good. Utah went 44-28 last season. The Jazz were deadly offensively by the end of the season and should’ve beaten the Nuggets in the first round, surrendering a 3-1 series lead. But, the roster wasn’t right. For the first time in forever, the Jazz were quite vulnerable defensively. Free agency acquisitions Jeff Green and Ed Davis didn’t work out. Conley’s acclimation to the roster went longer than anyone expected.
In hindsight, the Jazz knew they overcorrected themselves and went from a team that couldn’t score enough to a team that couldn’t generate enough defensive stops. That’s why they zeroed in on Favors. They knew getting him back would tie their rotation together in a way that couldn’t be quantified on paper. It was almost hilarious that a sizable portion of prognosticators dismissed his signing as one that wasn’t significant.
But Favors has done a few things for the Jazz. His addition allowed Gobert to expend more energy defensively without fear of fouling, knowing that Favors is a starting-caliber center who just happens to be coming off the bench. It’s allowed Snyder to play Favors against starting centers in the back half of quarters, which allows Gobert to play against second units, giving the Jazz a big advantage nightly.
“I think everyone has come into this season with a mindset of sacrificing,” Favors said. “And that’s how it’s working. This is an unselfish team. It doesn’t matter who scores. We’ve built the culture here and we know how fun it is to play this way.”
Mitchell credits the bubble as a turning point. That’s where the Jazz galvanized as a unit. It’s where he and Gobert settled their differences. Whatever their personal relationship is, and it’s clearly irrelevant now, they plainly play for one another on the floor. More importantly, they realized they needed each other professionally, something that took maturity and self-awareness on the parts of both men.
Gobert needs Mitchell’s ability to create offensively. Mitchell needs Gobert’s ability to be a one-man wrecking ball defensively. Both are playing at career levels.
The Jazz aren’t shying away from their desire to compete at the highest levels. “We want to be the best team in July, not February,” is how Mitchell puts it. But there’s no denying they have made the leap beyond being just a good team.
And in the quest for any team to break through a ceiling, making the leap is half the battle.
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