How much does Mike Conley's absence change the Utah Jazz's outlook in a Western Conference semifinal showdown against the LA Clippers?
The morning of Game 1 of the series Tuesday in Salt Lake City, the Jazz ruled Conley out of the game due to a mild strain of his right hamstring, which he suffered as they closed out the Memphis Grizzlies in the first round last Wednesday.
That means Utah must at least begin the series without its starting point guard, who this season made his long-overdue first All-Star appearance at age 33. And the fact that Conley didn't even get a chance for a pregame warm-up before a decision on his status -- he was a limited participant in Monday's practice before being ruled out -- suggests he might not be back for Game 2 either.
How big a factor is Conley's loss against a Clippers team that just came back from a 3-2 deficit to beat the Dallas Mavericks? How will Utah's game plan shift against LA's switch-heavy defense?
Let's break down what a sidelined Conley means for the start of this series.
Jazz without Conley
Conley has dealt with right hamstring injuries all season. He missed six games due to tightness in the hamstring in February and nine more beginning in late April, returning for the final two games of the regular season to prepare for the playoffs. He also sat out five games for injury management with the hamstring, accounting for 20 of the 21 games he missed during the regular season.
Despite Conley's April absence overlapping with one for All-Star shooting guard Donovan Mitchell, Utah went 15-6 (.714) without him, only marginally worse than the team's .725 winning percentage in games he started. The Jazz's record without Conley was still better than any other team posted during the regular season.
But taking a deeper look at Utah's performance and adjusting for opponent shows an interesting trend.
In games Conley missed, the Jazz's defense was not nearly so dominant. Utah held opponents 2.0 points per 100 possessions below their usual offensive rating, as compared to 5.0 points below with Conley. However, Utah made up for it at the offensive end, beating opponents' typical defensive rating by 7.3 points per 100 possessions without Conley as compared to 4.2 points better with him.
Adding those up, the Jazz's net rating without Conley (plus-9.3 points per 100 possessions) was marginally better than with him (plus-9.2).
This analysis paints a different picture than Utah's on-off data from NBA Advanced Stats, which shows Conley having the team's best on-court net rating (plus-16.7 points per 100 possessions, 13.7 better than when he was on the bench). The challenge there is separating Conley's impact from All-Star center Rudy Gobert.
Because their rotations overlapped, Conley played a remarkable 91% of his minutes with Gobert during the regular season. When Conley played without Gobert, the Jazz's net rating dropped to plus-8.0 per 100 possessions. It was stronger in a much larger sample of Gobert minutes without Conley (plus-12.3).
We again saw Utah play well without Conley when he left Game 5 against Memphis shortly into the second quarter. While the Jazz were already up 17 at that point, they extended their lead as large as 34 in the second half before the Grizzlies made up ground in the fourth quarter to make the final margin more respectable. The Clippers will likely present a more formidable challenge.
Matching up with the Clippers
The highest-scoring outing of Conley's Utah career came against the Clippers on New Year's Day, when he put up 33 points, knocking down seven 3-pointers to tie a career high in 14 attempts, the most he has ever taken in a game. Three of those triples came off pick-and-rolls where the Clippers tried to duck under the screen.
That's an inadvisable strategy against Conley, who shot 41.5% on pull-up 3-point attempts this season, best of any player with at least 150 such attempts this season according to NBA Advanced Stats. (Teammate Joe Ingles was No. 2 at 41.2%.)
We saw during the first round the problems pull-up 3s can cause Clippers center Ivica Zubac when he's asked to defend on the perimeter, and the Jazz are in many ways better equipped to take advantage. In addition to Conley and Ingles, Mitchell also hit pull-up 3s at a slightly better rate during the regular season than Dallas star Luka Doncic.
Clippers coach Tyronn Lue adjusted during the first round by largely taking Zubac off the court; he played fewer than eight total minutes in the Clippers' Game 6 and Game 7 wins combined. With veteran center Serge Ibaka unavailable due to back spasms, that left the Clippers playing almost exclusive perimeter players and switching most pick-and-rolls.
Before the Dallas series, the proof of concept for the Clippers' five-out style had come in a win against Utah in the teams' third and final meeting on Feb. 19. Lue played nearly the final 8:24 of that game without a center, bringing back Ibaka for the final two seconds as the Clippers maintained a narrow lead throughout that span.
Historically, the switching defense played by the Houston Rockets gave the Jazz's offense problems in easy series wins by Houston in both 2018 and 2019, making the strategy's appeal obvious for the Clippers. They switched eight of the 12 picks Utah ran against the five-out lineup on Feb. 19, per Second Spectrum tracking, with the latter number perhaps most important. The Jazz largely went away from the pick-and-roll, having run an equal number in the first 3:36 of the fourth quarter with Zubac in the game.
The addition of Conley was one key reason Utah felt better about its chances of beating a switch-heavy defense this time around. During the regular season, the Jazz averaged 1.09 points per chance on Conley pick-and-rolls where the opposing defense switched, the seventh-best mark among players with at least 100 such picks, according to Second Spectrum tracking. Backup guards Ingles (0.96 points per chance) and Jordan Clarkson (0.92) were not nearly as effective against switching defenses.
With time to build a game plan for the Clippers' defense, Utah's coaching staff will surely have other options to beat switches, including posting up Bojan Bogdanovic against smaller defenders. Still, in what figures to be a competitive series, losing Conley for any period of time looms large.
Before Conley was ruled out, I picked the Jazz to win this series in seven games. Knowing now that he'll miss at least the first game, I'm switching my pick to Clippers in six.
Article From & Read More ( NBA playoffs 2021 - What Mike Conley's Game 1 absence means for the Utah Jazz and the LA Clippers - ESPN )https://ift.tt/3ggvEGQ
Sports
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "NBA playoffs 2021 - What Mike Conley's Game 1 absence means for the Utah Jazz and the LA Clippers - ESPN"
Post a Comment