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Up-Tempo Cost us Last Night
Posted by: Jared Jardine on January 20th, 2012
The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of the Utah Jazz.Last night we had won 8 of 9 and were 7-1 at home with the Mavericks coming to town. In the first half we threw our style of play out the window to try to run the Mavericks out of the building, and in stead ran ourselves out of the building. It was a coaching blunder. Did Coach Corbin really think that the Mavericks who are loaded with veterans hadn’t ever seen a team that tried to jack up the tempo? There wasn’t any way that strategy was going to work, and instead it got both our offense, and more especially our defense totally out of position time after time. I applaud Coach Corbin’s willingness to shake things up and try new things, but against a veteran team like the Mavericks, you need to focus on what you do best, and make them try to stop it, and we simply do not have a Point Guard who is good enough to run up tempo and keep the team together. However, after gitting dominated in the first half, the Jazz rallied and were in the game from mid way through the 3rd peroid forward. I guess I would just prefer for experiments like this to be avoided vs teams that will obviously be difficult.
What are your thoughts? Did you like the up-tempo play? The Mavericks also focused their defense on Millsap which really bothered him early, and that could have been another large reason for the poor first half play.
Replies: 5
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5 Responses
If I was Rick Carlisle, I’d focus my defense on Millsap, too. I think this would have been a perfect opportunity for Corbin to ‘go big’, and put Millsap at the three against Odom and/or Marion along with (pick two) Favors/Jefferson/Kanter. Both those guys were too much to handle for Hayward. Then you could swing Hayward to the 2, where he would have the size advantage.
@KCJones – I have always thought that Hayward wouldn’t really break out of his funk until we moved him to the SG slot. When we are getting killed with size, it seems like a no-brainer to go big. We are one of the few teams in the league that can successfully pull it off.
We didn’t stick to the game plan the first half last night like we have the past 8 games. We took too many outside shots like we have been trying to force the other teams to take as of late. If we continue to play team ball like we did in the 2nd half, we will win a lot of games
Jared, thanks for the post. You’re definitely right in wanting to figure out what the Jazz did wrong and how to fix it, but I think a lot of the Jazz’s struggles had to do with the simple fact that they were playing a good team. The Mavericks have struggled a bit this year, but they’re still the champs and have a deep and talented roster. And with that championship experience, they know how to clamp down defensively when they need to. That caused Utah’s problems in the 4th quarter, exacerbated by the fact that the Jazz don’t shoot well from the perimeter. That’s what good teams do, they take you out of your game and out of your comfort zone. In the first half, I thought more of the Jazz’s problems were on the defensive end–they gave up 59 points in the first half, and a surprising number of buckets on lay-ups in the half-court set. The Jazz did a much better job of that in the 2nd half (especially the 3rd quarter) but had some lapses (by Hayward and especially Burks) on Marion and Beaubois in the 4th quarter. Too many uncontested lay-ups. Hopefully they’ll bounce back against Minnesota.
Our problem in the first half wasn’t our offense as much as it was the defense; the Mavericks were getting to the hoop way too easy. When Favors and Kanter were inserted that seemed to solve that problem some.
Jefferson and Millsap are going to be undersized in certain matchups every now and then. The sooner Favors and Kanter improve their offensive ability the better. That way they can stay on the court longer if necessary in those situations.