Breakdown of Utah Jazz Offense by play type, frequency, and success

This season the Utah Jazz are fighting for a playoff spot, but most of the fight is coming on offense. The Jazz are #5 in points per game (ppg): 99.0. The Jazz are ranked #7 in Offensive Rating as well, so our points are not purely a product of playing our blistering 12th place pace. The other side of the coin is defense, where the Jazz aren't a Top 5 team. That's the polite way to state it. Over all, the Jazz still give up more points than they put up. Yet we're above .500.

Anyway, let's take a closer look at this Top 5 offense . . .

Legend: Each pie slice is one type of play. The Percentage number is just how big a piece of the pie that play type is for the Jazz this season. The Number in orange/yellow is the rank the Jazz get our of the 30 NBA teams for that play type. The Rank is based upon success rate, and in this case success rate is based upon Points per Possession (PPP), which is the main metric that mySynergySports uses.

All Data accurate up to the minute from mySynergySports.com.

The Jazz make their money in the paint, they are #10 best in NBA rank on our Cut plays, #11 on Post ups, #13 off of offensive rebounds, and #14 when getting the ball into the hands of the guy setting the pick, on pick and rolls. That's still only 39.0% of all of our offensive plays. Should this be a larger number if those are the only things we're good at?

The one thing we're really bad at are spot ups. We're almost last in the league, and this is something all teams have to be able to do -- make open, spot up jumpers. It's also how the majority of our offensive plays end up. We're also almost dead last when the play ends with the ball handler in a pick and roll. We're hardly any better in isolations.

I can understand it's hard to make jumpers or be a dynamic Stockton type if you just don't have good shooters on your team. But being #23 in NBA rank on transition plays is inexcusable. We need all the easy baskets we can get. We're not making it easier on ourselves if we can't make transition plays. I'm blaming Josh Howard for this, we've all seen him in transition. We've seen it in the first game of the season where he didn't pass off on a fast break and airballed an open layup.

Anyway, we need to do better. And this is the stuff we're good at -- offense.