The Triple Team: 3 thoughts on Jazz vs. Suns


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PHOENIX — Three thoughts on the Jazz's 98-89 win over the Phoenix Suns from KSL.com's Utah Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.

1. Dominating 1st quarter wins the game for the Jazz

The first quarter for the Jazz was their most dominating of the season, a 31-12 affair in which they stifled the Suns offensively and got great looks on their own shots.

Gordon Hayward was incredible in the quarter, finding every way to score. On defense, he limited the Suns' perimeter attack. On offense, he made tough shots, spinning looks and got to the line. Check out this dunk!

Raul Neto was also great in the quarter, scoring eight points on four shots. When he's a scoring threat, the Jazz are much more difficult to stop, and it showed in that quarter.

The Jazz's offense didn't have any turnovers in the first quarter while the defense allowed the Suns zero points in the paint. It was so bad that new Suns coach Earl Watson actually used a hockey-like lineup change by bringing five new players to the scorer's table to check in at the same time.

In the end, it was the 19-point lead the Jazz accrued in the first half that carried them throughout.

2. Jazz struggle a little with Suns trapping perimeter defense

Credit the Suns, though, for flipping the switch back on in the second quarter. The bench unit brought much more energy and they started to get up into the Jazz's perimeter players, trapping them a little bit and making them pass the ball to get advantages.

The Jazz struggled a little with that. Part of that is due to their bench personnel: Chris Johnson, Erick Green, Trevor Booker and Trey Lyles don't really have the ballhandling skills to dribble themselves out of trouble. And even Raul Neto, Gordon Hayward and Rodney Hood, who are quite good ballhandlers, naturally passed the ball when the Suns sent two players to trap them on the wing pick-and-rolls.

That's one situation in which a speedy guard might help the Jazz. I wrote about the possibility of acquiring Jeff Teague one week ago today, and that's still being considered by Utah. Those types of negotiations are difficult and I've been told numerous times that teams often don't really reveal what they want in exchange for a player until 24-48 hours before the trade deadline. That seems to be the case with Atlanta and Teague.

With or without that sort of quick guard, the Suns' perimeter pressure actually is good practice for the Jazz moving forward. As they continue to fight for playoff seeding (now just half a game behing the Houston Rockets), teams will begin to gameplan at a high level to win important head-to-head matchups.

One of those is the Jazz's next game, against the Dallas Mavericks on Tuesday. The Mavs had lost three in a row before beating the Grizzlies in overtime Saturday. So we'll see what kind of defensive resistance Dallas puts up.

3. Hack-a-Gobert ruins the end of the game

It's not like it was going to be an exciting finish anyway, with the Jazz up 12 with 2:35 left to go, but the way the Suns made the end interminable ... it was a chore.

The Suns intentionally fouled Rudy Gobert as often as they could. Gobert, who came into the season shooting 60 percent from the line, wound up at the line 12 times and made nine to seal the game.

For Watson to do that was interesting. Sure, fouling Gobert gave the Suns extra possessions, which they used to impressive effect by getting to the line themselves while also making tough 3-point shots. But fouling Gobert that many times also gave the Jazz a pretty good shot of scoring between 3-9 points on those six possessions. It would have been unlikely to see Gobert make two or less, or make 10 or more, free throws when given 12 opportunities.

In other words, fouling Gobert actually reduced the Jazz's variance on their offensive possessions, making it difficult for the Suns to go on a net plus-12-point run that they needed in order to win the game. Strategically, I believe Watson made the right call.

Aesthetically, hack-a-so-so-free-throw-shooter is horrendous. It takes forever, it's not at all exciting from an athletic perspective and it means that it takes the ball out of the stars' hands, certainly not what you'd want to see in an exciting game. It would be like if, before every play in tomorrow's Super Bowl, the Denver Broncos had the option of forcing the Panthers to run a fullback up the middle instead of having the ball in Cam Newton's hands.

It's a rule that needs to change. My proposed solution is for the NBA to begin penalizing all obvious intentional fouls outside of the last two minutes with two free throws plus loss of possession, making hack-a-player and fast-break-stopping fouls unquestionably a bad idea.

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Andy Larsen

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