For Trey Lyles, it's all about the little things


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SALT LAKE CITY — I'll admit at first, I wasn't a big fan of the selection of Trey Lyles. On the surface, he's just so vanilla. He averaged 8.7 points per game and 5.0 rebounds per game. He didn't block a lot of shots, didn't hit a high percentage, and isn't really a great athlete. He wasn't a good shooter in college, only making 37 percent of his jump shots and 14 percent of his 3-point shots. And he wasn't a particularly hard-nosed player. He doesn't show the obvious effort that, say, Bobby Portis does.

Lyles doesn't help this with his off-court media persona, which is as bland and cliche as can be. At his workout with the Jazz, he told the media, "I just try to go out there and work hard and try to make it to where I want to be."

After the draft, when asked on his thoughts after being taken by the Jazz he said, "I'm just thankful to be drafted." Trying to coax a personality out of him, a local radio station asked him about his favorite band. He couldn't think of one.

Snooze.

But Jazz GM Dennis Lindsey is a uniquely convincing man. In a 25-minute conversation after the draft Lindsey shared what his team saw in Lyles. My problem was that Lyles' good characteristics aren't at surface level. They're the little things, things that you don't notice at first glance.

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Lindsey started to list them off.

First off, Lyles' size is surprising. As Lindsey said, "He's a lot bigger than you realize. He's a 6-foot-10.5-inch, 243 ... 7-1 wingspan. He also has very large hands."

That's definitely good size for the NBA. He's actually measured as taller than Derrick Favors was when he entered the league.

That wasn't all the Jazz found out in Lyles' visit to Utah June 13. They also had him shoot 40 3s from the corner and he made 25. That's far better than what he showed at the college level. And when they interviewed Lyles, they found "that he knows basketball systems very well," and his intelligence could make him fit into head coach Quin Snyder's somewhat complex, read-and-react system right away.

The Jazz also liked his playmaking ability. Upon watching tape, Lindsey said some of the coaches compared his passing ability to that of Spurs forward Boris Diaw.

"A couple of our coaches said, 'Hey, his ability to drive and dish off and play unselfish basketball was very intriguing to us,'" Lindsey said.

Like Diaw, Lyles may not always get credit for an assist, but he's responsible for making the defense change its shape, and then he is great at accurately putting the ball in the best place to take advantage.

Diaw isn't the only championship starting forward Lyles was connected to. Lindsey also drew the comparison from Lyles to Draymond Green in his ability to defensive rebound and immediately lead a fastbreak, taking advantage of the transition opportunity to create cross matches.

About those sorts of plays, Lindsey said, "There's quite a bit of hidden value there."

You can even dig deeper. While Lyles' rebounding numbers weren't impressive, some of that was due to Kentucky playing him out of position at the small forward spot. So how do you tell how Lyles would perform if playing at the 4 full time, as Lindsey asserted he will at the NBA level? Analytics.

"Our analytic people were able to take out the play-by-play, and what it showed is when he played minutes at the 4, he was an above-average rebounder as a defensive rebounder. And he was top 20 in the nation in his offensive rebounding rate when he played the 4."

But if that's not enough data science for you, you can even get more wonky. The Jazz have recently purchased machines to put in the Zions Bank Basketball Center that measure a player's "proprioception", or as Lindsey explained, "a fancy word for balance." Lyles had the highest score on the machine of any of the 101 prospects the Jazz brought into the draft, and they feel that balance will help him moving forward as he deals with making faster decisions and movements on offense and defense.

In short, once these little skills are put together with the help of the deep analysis the Jazz did before the draft began, Lyles starts to look like a truly helpful winning player moving forward. While you could say the Jazz are missing the forest for the trees here with Lyles, those individual trees also happen to match a lot of the Jazz's roster needs.

The result was the Jazz front office thought Lyles was hugely valuable. Lindsey reported that there were "multiple teams" that were presenting "multiple firsts to move into 12." But ultimately, those firsts weren't great value when compared to the Jazz's opinion of Lyles.

"What (those offers) did was it validated the value that we felt that was there," Lindsey explained.

If you ask Lyles about what values he brings to the team, though, he's typically less evocative: "I'm a guy who can step in and help contribute immediately," he said after his selection Thursday night.

Maybe it's a good thing Lyles will have Lindsey around to sing his praises.

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Andy Larsen

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