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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.