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A Closer look at the Jazz offense: Spot Ups

March 12, 2012; Salt Lake City, UT, USA; Utah Jazz shooting guard Raja Bell (19) warms up prior to a game against the Detroit Pistons at Energy Solutions Arena. Mandatory Credit: Russ Isabella-US PRESSWIRE
March 12, 2012; Salt Lake City, UT, USA; Utah Jazz shooting guard Raja Bell (19) warms up prior to a game against the Detroit Pistons at Energy Solutions Arena. Mandatory Credit: Russ Isabella-US PRESSWIRE

According to the data at mySynergySports.com the Jazz are the #28th best team in the league on spot up jumpers, but are stubborn (or desperate enough) to dedicated18.10 of the offense to these plays. The Jazz love to go inside out, but the bad part of that is if the inside is dissuaded by help defense then the second part of that plan needs to go back out again. Teams know we can't hurt them from out. But we still have to take those shots otherwise we're just screwing over our bigs by giving them no help. The Jazz live in the paint, but to live you need room to breathe -- you need to hit spot up jumpers. So let's look at how they do with spot ups:

Spot Up
Bigs # of plays % of plays PPP Rank FG%
Al Jefferson 76 7.6% 0.79 228 38.7%
Paul Millsap 156 17.2% 0.87 187 41.3%
Derrick Favors 26 4.9% 0.54 304 31.8%
Enes Kanter 13 0.4% 0.77 NA 38.5%
Jeremy Evans 4 10.0% 0.25 NA 0.0%
Wings
Raja Bell 74 35.7% 1.05 79 37.0%
Josh Howard 109 24.4% 0.66 287 28.9%
C.J. Miles 145 25.4% 0.97 126 35.3%
Gordon Hayward 174 27.0% 0.93 157 35.1%
Alec Burks 79 21.1% 0.81 214 38.6%
DeMarre Carroll 10 27.0% 1.00 NA 40.0%
Point Guards
Devin Harris 135 23.4% 1.02 96 36.8%
Earl Watson 58 22.5% 0.62 295 25.9%
Jamaal Tinsley 26 20.2% 0.96 133 34.6%


This is supposed to be something our bigs don't dominate, yet here we have Paul Millsap being the #2 guy on the team with spot up attempts. Insanity. Raja Bell was straight up money after his kid was born, but after his continual abductor problems, his shot went on vacation. The next best guy is Devin Harris -- who started off shooting air ball after air ball in crunch time but has caught fire. Much maligned C.J. Miles gets the bronze medal here. He ranks #126 in the whole league. That translates to being a #4 guy on any given team in spot ups. (30 teams in the league, 30 x 4 = 120) The problem is that he's being asked to shoot like the #3 or #2 best guy on spot ups due to injuries. That's a problem. Hayward is #157 -- and the Jazz need him to be our #2 or #3 guy in making these shots. He isn't, despite taking the most shots of this nature, but we whip CJ for Gordon not being better at this -- you know, regular Jazz fan behavior.

Alec Burks is our knight in shining armor here -- he actually MAKES these shots (FG%), but his PPP is down here. I guess there's more to this equation than just making shots, I don't know why his NBA Rank is so low. This appears to be in error. Part of it could be that guys like Raja and C.J. get to the line on spot ups while Burks does not? (hence, his PPP is lower than normal?)

Still, we're an inside/out team. We need the out part of the equation to make life easy for our bigs on the inside. The bigs are doing their job. Even one of the bigs is actually doing this job too (Millsap). The rest of these guys have to step it up.

Btw, Jamaal is better than Earl at this. And I fully didn't want Jamaal on my team. So I gotta point that out.