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This season the Utah Jazz are firing a bunch of threes. No, they're not jacking them. And they're not a consequence of the defense making the team take a lot of prayer threes with the shot clock going down. The threes this season are by design. They are a product of the offense working. The bigs set the screens, the ball handlers penetrate. They draw the defense in, then reverse the ball back out to an open spot up shooter.
It's San Antonio Spurs -like. The results just aren't.
This season the Utah Jazz have gone 109 / 332 from outside, which is .32.8%. When you average it out it's 6.8 threes made a game, and 20.8 hoists from deep. The NBA ranks are 18th in makes, 14th in takes, and 23rd in percentage. That's not an awesome look.
A bad shot is the self made pull-up three. That's what we saw a lot last season. The Jazz shot 262 pull up threes last season (More than three a game). And as you can imagine, they didn't make a lot. Thankfully the Jazz aren't going nuts with this shot this year. The problem is that the spot up jump shooting (the shot we are purposefully manufacturing) isn't jump shot making.
Last season the team shot fewer spot up threes, but made more of them. This year, well, yeah. They're only making 35.7% of them, compared to 36.5% the year before.
It's not just the spot ups that are the problem, it's how the players do when they are open. Last season the players on the Jazz were making contested threes (47.4%) better than the ones where they are open by 6+ feet (37.9%). But they were still making nearly 38%. This year? Only 37.1% of the super-duper wide open ones are made. Not much of a difference. But you know what is? The 4-6' open shots, where the Jazz are only making 29.7% of them this year. Last season they made 33.8% of those quite open shots.
But the team's gotta keep taking them. That's the shot that we want. Eventually they'll start falling.
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And yes, that is the whole reason for this post.