Hmm, it looks like Paul Millsap, Devin Harris, and Tyrone Corbin were all on the same team before. This is the team photo from the USA Select Team in 2009, back in their Vegas Salad days. This is a good group of guys -- some of them have gone on to dominate the league since they were on the Select Team. This off-season in Vegas two more of our players will be there: Derrick Favors and Gordon Hayward. Who knows which other players, potential future Utah Jazz players, will they be playing with?

Who is crazy? Amar is crazy. Here's a chart that shows the individual PERs by playing time for our team this past year. PER isn't the perfect stat . . . but it's not like anyone is asking me to do one for Go Rating or anything . . . This is based upon most minutes (total for the regular season) till least, from the Left to the Right.

Full Sized image here

The Utah Jazz were at the top of the Western Conference for quite a while, they went to the Western Conference finals 5 times in 7 seasons. A lot of people outside of Utah seem to not remember that -- the Jazz were more than just a team that broke through to the NBA Finals twice. The Jazz were right there on a number of occasions. There was a five year peak (1995-1996 till 1999-2000) where the Jazz were always 'right there'. I crunched the numbers for those five Jazz teams, got the average, and compare them to what we managed this past season.

This Jazz core is at the bottom of the playoff mountain, but in order to climb to the top we need to fix a few things. Luckily, we've been to the summit before. We know how to get there. And by looking at the type of team we were during that stretch of excessive success we can better understand what, specifically, we need to change. We can climb back up to the top. But we have to be honest with what we have, and not afraid to make the changes we need.

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Once upon a time there was a wizened old Master, Master Hornacek. He was patient and skilled master who had moved from the hard desert lands where he gained a lot of notoriety towards the eastern lands. He moved back west in the year 1993-1994 -- and from there joined a powerful mountain monastery of the Jazz Clan. There he trained hard, and alongside other great Masters he reached the highest peaks of individual and collective success . . . before moving again to travel the world.

He would return, and has returned. Now he works to train at that same Mountain Monastery. Master Hornacek trains younger players today . . . but today he may have finally found that perfect set of students. He has found the Fourteenth Wing of Hornacek...

If you like old Kung-Fu movies, creative writing, and a long succession of stats . . . click on

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Sports Illustrated Sam Amick interviewed Jerry Sloan and their talk is up on the SI site -- you can see it all here. There are a number of interesting points made in it. Our cousins over at Rufus on Fire, the SBN Charlotte Bobcats site, already put their take on the interview here. We're all praying for Cardboard Gerald, and I think the points he focuses on are things I honestly did not think of. As a Bobcats fan they are concerned with Jerry Sloan, not from the point that he's super oldschool and does not tolerate tanking -- but because they fear he has no experience with coaching a rebuilding team. (Yes, it was a pleasant surprise to know that concerns of Bobcat fans aren't the same concerns as Jazz fans)

In the interview with Amick, Jerry dispels that concern succinctly:

SI.com: You spent most of your coaching life going to the arena expecting to win almost every single night. Do you think it would be quite an adjustment to take on a job like Charlotte (which finished with a record-low .106 winning percentage)?

Sloan: You've got to realize that I played on an expansion team in my second year [the 1966-67 Chicago Bulls]. We were supposed to win 10 games. And you deal with a bunch of guys who are willing to work and put in a lot of effort, you never know what can happen. We won 33 games, and I think we were the only expansion team to make the playoffs.

That, to me, was an interesting thing to be involved with. I don't mean to say that [the Bobcats] are an expansion team, but they've struggled some and you never know. Maybe the minds work together and something comes out of it. Maybe they don't. I don't know.

There's more to it than just the challenge, or going to a place bereft of expectations. Jerry talks about his health and how he's feeling great. He talks about the other teams that may or may not be interested in him (the Orlando Magic and possibly Portland Trail Blazers). But most of all, he does talk about being interested in coaching again. Period.

Check out the full interview here. And check out the Bobcats coverage of it here.

This last season we got to see, straight up, that this team is rebuilding a contender. The Utah jazz played 66 games in the regular season, and made the playoffs. We played in playoffs games, guys! There were a lot of doubters, myself included. But the Jazz proved me wrong. That said, the Jazz weren't really in all of the games they played in. Part of this was based upon HOW we played -- the Jazz had a good offense, but our defense was a bad as it's every been. While the playoffs games were not really hard to predict -- the Jazz did win enough to get there. I respect that. But the Jazz have a number of things to work on.

Our "deal" was scoring. We were the #4 team in the league in points per game (PPG). Even though we we finished the season with a -0.4 margin (for all 70 games). No doubt, the playoffs were a big reason for that.

How did the Jazz score from quarter to quarter? Were we slow starters? If so, was this an issue of who we were starting games with? Or just the fact that the other team had better starters than we did?

Was there a difference in how we fared against the entire league (29 teams, 70 total games), vs. how we fared against just the Western Conference playoff teams (7 teams, 29 games)? If there was, which set of values is more important?

Numbers, graphs, and accusations after the jump!

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The NBA's best players perform the best when it counts. They also get the most media time, have the most fans, sell the most merch, have the most twitter followers, and get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to getting calls from the refs in close games. They also, usually, are also the players who perform the best when it counts. I could care less about awards and hardware for individuals. What I do care about is team success. And it's easier to reach team goals when your team is led on the court by one of the best NBA players. Things go your way.

Without one of these de facto Top 15 NBA players your club either has to rely upon extreme cohesion, luck, or the other team pooping the bed in order to get by. The teams that advance in the playoffs seem to have at least one (if not more) of these guys on their team. This is not a new phenomina either, when WE had Karl Malone and John Stockton on our team we got far, and they were put on these All-NBA teams yearly. We know the best players perform the best. And they make life easier for your team -- which leads to win. Which is why I seem to harp about this a lot.

If the guys leading your team are not Top 15 players, and we have guys sitting behind them who have the potential to be Top 15 dudes, you are only hurting your teams' PRESENT and hurting your teams' FUTURE by being stubborn about things.

Anyway, here's the first team.

The All-NBA Second, Third, and "others getting vote" lists after the jump.

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The toughness of our Jazz team last year has been questioned several times. Whether it's JJ Barea bumping Hayward at the FT line, or Dirk smacking the ball out of the hands of Derrick Favors, besides Earl Watson our team seemed to be a little soft.

In the aftermath of the ugly Miami-Indiana game, I'm wondering what kind of toughness we want from our team. Do we want our team to go as far as we saw in that game—the head attacks masquerading as going for the ball, and elbows intentionally thrown at guys' throats?

I'm also reminded of what Tim Duncan said about his silence and unflappable game face (sorry for everyone who is tired of me gushing about the Spurs) in the same interview I quoted last week:

His on-court demeanor is so reserved that The Onion once ran a story titled, TIM DUNCAN HAMS IT UP FOR CROWD BY ARCHING LEFT EYEBROW SLIGHTLY. This impression is intentional, it turns out. Duncan has said he uses silence to "destroy people's psyches." He explains, "The best mind game you can run on someone is just to keep going at them and at them until they break." Don't respond, don't show emotion. Just keep playing. "Eventually," he says with a grin, "you'll piss them off."

I suppose in the end, the question is the same: what kind of toughness do you hope our guys can develop, and how do you hope to see such toughness manifested?

This season I mocked the "winning culture" vs. "losing culture" paradigm KOC used when he defended giving veteran players playing time over the kids. I still say it's ludicrous. I also say that missing the playoffs one or two times doesn't necessarily establish a "losing culture". Though if you do it like Golden State, then you probably will.

Ultimately I thought it was a copout and the worry doesn't apply to the Jazz at all. Here's a quote from John Hollinger about JaVale McGee:

Turns out he's not just a punch line. McGee showed more development in two months in Denver than he had in four years in Washington, particularly on the offensive end where he showed some refinement with a sweeping hook shot. McGee still takes ridiculous chances on blocking shots he has no hope of reaching and leaves his feet constantly on the defensive end. On the other hand, he went for 21-14 against an elite frontcourt to key a close playoff road win, rejected a phenomenal 22 shots in 181 minutes, and had three 14-rebound efforts in seven games. In other words, while he's still something of a project, he's a productive project

The losing culture of the Wizards come from a front office that has no idea what it's doing, years of coaching staffs with no control of players, and a collection of knuckleheads on their roster.

But move a player from that incompetent team to one with a good front office, with a good coaching staff, and players who aren't idiots, and suddenly he actually starts making progress. As Hollinger stated, "more progress in two months ... than he had in four years in Washington."

A losing culture or winning culture is not dictated by whether a team wins most of its games or not in a random year. It's created by a front office that knows what it's doing. And that's why I always felt safe. While there are times KOC bugs me, he's one of the most competent GM's in the league.

Hickory High (a truly fantastic blog) posted some graphics to illustrate a team's offensive effectiveness. It charts both the most effective plays in terms of both players and play type. For example, on the Jazz a Millsap cut was the most effective scoring play. A Josh Howard spot up was the worst. The graph also shows the frequency with which a given play was used. It doesn't include every single play and player—only those used at least 100 times last year. Here is the Jazz:

via www.hickory-high.com

This chart just kills me. The Jazz really do have a variety of decent offensive options. And that variety will only get more diverse and more effective as the kids continue to improve. But there's one play that the team depends on over and over and over: the Al Jefferson post up. Notice that the only other spike is the Millsap post up.

So that's our team's offense. No wonder it was stagnant and easy to defend by the Spurs in the playoffs.

Here's to a bit more offensive creativity in the future. More movement, please.

Here's a list of things I hope some of the young players improve next year. We'll start, of course, with my favorite dude on the team:

1. Gordon Hayward: Mostly just recite to yourself, 100 times daily: "I am the best freaking all-around player on the team, and I'm going to act like it." Also: contested layups.
2. Derrick Favors: the release of his shot. Everything else looks so good offensively—his footwork, his moves (he's got four primary post moves), but his release is inconsistent. Once he can nail that, everything else will be there.
3. Alec Burks: Consistent effort on defense and more deflections (he showed flashes, but not consistent brilliance) reading defenses and running back-door, weak-side cuts, and a little more emphasis on passing (his passing is fantastic—I hope it can become just a bit more prominent).
4. Enes Kanter: Gain an inch on your vertical leap, consistently do the great man-to-man D we saw flashes of last year, use your entire offensive repertoire without hesitation: the jumper, the hooks, everything. The Utah Jazz Blog posted a video of Kanter pre-draft (they thought it was a recent video: Ha Ha!). Go watch it. He's had a year to see what game-speed is, to experience NBA defenders ... now let's see him put that stuff into play. He's seriously got the talent.

I really, really dislike how long the NBA playoffs get drawn out—all so TNT can try to do their 40 in 40 thing. The best series of the entire playoffs may be the Spurs and Thunder ... and it will begin 6 days after the lesser LA team was booted.

I remember playoffs back in the early 90's—there was a kind of steady crescendo of excitement from the first round to the NBA Finals. I feel like that is missing today because it takes so much time to finish a single series. And then so much extra time to start the next one.

I have my own ideas about what would be better—but they're involved enough to need an entire post. But what would you do to improve the NBA playoffs?