Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — Before Tuesday night's game, Utah Jazz coach Will Hardy discussed the team's deficiencies on defense and registered critiques about their communication, effort, and pride. After Tuesday night's game, Hardy was focused on the team's struggles with pattern recognition and situational awareness.
If nothing else, his comments were a measured and logical (if indirect) response to the escalating howls emanating from outside the organization along the lines of: "We know we're bad and we're intentionally tanking, so why don't we just be bad and tanking while playing the rookies 35 minutes per game?"
His indirect reply: It's not warranted, and it won't provide an automatic panacea to your heartache anyway.
Yes, these are hard and desperate times for anyone who finds non-conveyance of a draft pick to be insufficient balm for yet another season of non-competitiveness on the court.
Even if you recognize the thought process behind the decision to bottom out and thus engineer a path toward retaining a second consecutive top-10 draft pick, that doesn't make the tangible process of sitting through a 13-game losing streak any more palatable.
Such is the scenario that has Jazz fans' blood pressure rising to medically-concerning levels when Hardy pulled the rookies off the court five minutes into the Clippers blowout and not re-deploying them until halfway through the third quarter.
Such are the circumstances that have them shaking their heads and screaming at their televisions when Brice Sensabaugh logs just under 21 minutes against Denver while Taylor Hendricks is limited to just shy of 22.
Just play the freaking rookies!
Right?
"They're still in survival mode," Hardy noted, simply.
And that's apparent from watching them play.
There have been fun moments, there have been encouraging stretches … and there has been plenty of evidence that, while they have made progress in some areas, there is no meteoric leap forthcoming in these final three games if only Hardy would just routinely send them out there and let them do their thing.
The best way for them to improve is by getting out there and getting nightly NBA experience, the common refrain goes.
And that seems like a sensible notion — in a vacuum.
The front office's mandates on who can play and how often have had a deleterious impact on player development. Hardy astutely noted the cascading effect of Lauri Markkanen, Jordan Clarkson, Collin Sexton, John Collins, and so on and so on all sitting out for extended stretches — namely, that Keyonte George goes from the bottom of opponents' scouting reports to the top.
Furthermore, his game goes from deferring to Markkanen, Clarkson, Sexton and Collins, and picking his spots in the leftover moments to now becoming a No. 1 option out of virtual necessity.
Either extreme is not necessarily indicative of who George is and what he might become, but the point is that guaranteeing him 36 minutes a night within these parameters is not an inherent pathway to proper development.
Hardy on Tuesday night noted that his team was actually pretty competitive, actually had some viable stretches against the reigning champions, and were ultimately undone by failing to hammer away on the rare advantages they had.
By example, he pointed to a stretch where he believed that a two-man game featuring Omer Yurtseven and Luka Samanic could capitalize against a particular Nuggets defense, and Samanic got buckets on two consecutive possessions … and then everyone just kinda sorta forgot to keep it up.
"Luka scored twice in the post … and then after those two possessions, we pretended like Luka didn't exist, and Luka pretended like he didn't exist," Hardy said.
"The teams that are thinking as a group and feeling the moment and understanding what's going on, they're going to ride that wave," he added. "That's what we're hunting, is that level of awareness as a team to understand, in that moment, where our advantage is."
The coach noted that he's seen the rookies improve over the course of the season in their understanding of the game. He also added that most of that improvement shows up in film sessions, when they're sitting in a quiet room with ample time to assess and analyze, and that it tends to go out the window when they're on a court going up against guys from other teams while surrounded by thousands of screaming fans.
It's understandable that, with three miserable games to go, fans latch onto the idea of giving the first-year guys as much run as possible.
To reiterate Hardy's blunt assessment: "They're still in survival mode."
Hard and desperate times, indeed. There likely will ultimately be a silver lining to this. But it doesn't entail George and Hendricks and Sensabaugh averaging 36 minutes a night against the Rockets and Clippers and Warriors these next few nights.
