SALT LAKE CITY — Three thoughts on the Jazz's 98-93 Game 6 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers from KSL.com's Utah Jazz beat writer, Andy Larsen.

1. Jazz offense loses force, can't find good shots

In the first half, the Jazz's biggest problem was mostly just missing some open shots. In the second half, the problem was that the Jazz didn't get good looks, and that's far more worrying.

The Clippers did everything in their power to slow the Jazz down. They cut off the Jazz's cutters. They held both screeners and ball-handlers on pick and roll. They were the more physical team on the glass. And most importantly, they trapped the Jazz's ball-handlers, and forced the ball into the hands of players who weren't comfortable taking shots. That meant the Clippers had time to rotate back into defensive position over and over again.

Take a look at the Jazz's second-half shot chart, for example:

That more Jazz attempts take place from mid-range than anywhere else is a bad sign. Those are not the looks that a Quin Snyder offense is designed to generate.

In many ways, the new Clippers lineup deserves a lot of credit. They played small for the entire game, and the Jazz's small look didn't handle the quicker Clippers. Austin Rivers looked healthy, playing 34 minutes of good defense on Gordon Hayward, Rodney Hood, and any other player he faced.

"I thought their physicality on the defensive end, we didn't respond offensively, the way that we needed to or as forceful as we needed to be," Snyder said. "When you're in that, you're not aggressive enough in your frame of mind, I don't think you shoot the ball as well."

2. Jazz didn't get much help from wing depth

Gordon Hayward and George Hill had good scoring nights. Hayward scored 31 points on 9-20 shooting, and while he struggled to make his 3-point shots early, he figured out other ways to score, by getting to the line and making the free throws (10-11 from the stripe) and making some interior shots.

George Hill scored 22 points, on 8-13 shooting. While his free throw shooting left something to be desired (he was 5-9), he made a number of tough shots inside to get points when the Jazz were struggling to score.

Joe Johnson, Rodney Hood, and Joe Ingles, on the other hand, all struggled. Johnson missed the potential game-tying shot, but even he found it hard to play against the Clippers' trapping defense. He had to swing the ball, and found himself missing some of those passes. In the end, he finished with nine points on 3-9 shooting, three turnovers, and a -18 plus-minus.

Hood was pretty bad. The most notable problem was 2-10 shooting, and 0-6 3-point shooting. Early in the game, Hood missed good looks, and then late in the game, he tried to take difficult shots to get himself going and missed those too. That's acceptable, and the Jazz have enough faith in Hood regaining his shooting ability to have him keep shooting.

But he also needs to be more of an impact player on the defensive end. The Clippers toasted him on that end of the floor, getting separation on straight line drives, and even baiting him into bad fouls to get to the line.

Hood ended with four points, three rebounds, no assists, one turnover, and a -21 plus-minus in a 24 minute effort.

And Ingles seems to have lost some magic late in this series. After the first four games when he was a contributor on both ends of the floor, the Clippers have stopped Ingles by trapping his pick and rolls and just by not leaving him open when they rotate. His defense is still pretty good, but that's now two consecutive games of zero points. He's 0-8 overall and 0-7 from the 3-point line in the series.

A lot of this is shot-making, and you'd hope that these players would make more of their looks than this just through regression to the mean in Game 7. But the defensive problems from a couple of those players, and lack of playmaking from those wings in game 6, have left the Jazz in a do-or-die situation.

3. Getting rid of the unnatural 3-point shooting foul

I hate this call more than any other thing in basketball right now:

I think Chris Paul jumped into DEANDRE JORDAN on this one. Can u hear me shaking my head? pic.twitter.com/rAqlc8gNgv — BBALLBREAKDOWN (@bballbreakdown) April 29, 2017

Chris Paul, trying to get contact, runs hard into the screen. He makes some sort of indeterminate contact with either DeAndre Jordan or George Hill, and forces up a stupid 3-point shot that's only saved by the whistle that comes.

This is a scourge against the game. It's not basketball.

Chris Paul's not the only one who does this, either. George Hill used a similar move to get shots tonight, and the Rockets had 13 fouls called in their favor on 3-point shooting attempts in their shorter 5-game series. No matter the culprit, the crime needs to be stopped.

One of my favorite sports writers growing up was Bill James, a baseball writer. I grew up here in Utah, and it's not particularly natural for a Utah kid to grow up a baseball fan unless he has a particularly good reason to do so. For me, that reason was Bill James. His writing was so analytical and yet so fun to read that it really inspired me to learn about a game that I really had no idea about.

Anyway, James once wrote really positively about rule changes in basketball (while suggesting that baseball make a few rule changes of its own) in the New Historical Baseball Abstract:

The general effect of these rule changes is not to make the game something new and different, but simply to stop people from using tricks and gimmicks, and force them to play basketball. Most basketball rule changes, like the new rule designed to prevent a player from calling timeout as he is falling out of bounds, are simply a way of saying to coaches and players "stop messing around and play basketball."

This kind of play is the definition of messing around and not playing basketball. Free throws are not basketball. Forcing contact 35 feet from the basket for no reason is not basketball. It's too late to change how this play is officiated for these playoffs, but something needs to be done before next season.

How do you fix it? I liked this suggestion from Kevin Pelton:

That's a big change, but it would fix a lot of problems. Let's see what the league's next move is this offseason.

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