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SALT LAKE CITY — "Defense travels" has been the mantra for Quin Snyder and his young Jazz team early in the season. The idea: with 8 of the Jazz's first 10 games on the road, the team needs to rely on its defensive identity in order to pick up wins.
Jazz swingman Gordon Hayward explained "defense travels" before the season began.
"I think you definitely have to play defense, especially on the road, because sometimes things don't go your way offensively," Hayward said. "But you can always count on defense, it always gives you a chance. So we have to get off to great starts on the road, and we have to play great defense."
I was curious: is good defense the key to road success? To figure it out, I analyzed the last 15 years of NBA seasons, everything since 2000. I looked at those 446 different teams' defensive ratings (as defined by points allowed per 100 possessions), and then calculated their win percentage on the road. Then, I calculated the correlation between those two values in the dataset.
What did I find? Well, it's true: good defense helps you become a successful road team. There's a 0.59 correlation between defensive rating and road success. That means defensive rating explains about 34.8 percent of road record.
But do you know what's more highly correlated with road success? Offense.
When I did the same research but with offensive rating, I found a 0.62 correlation, meaning offensive rating explains about 38.4% of road success. That's not a lot more, but it is a slight positive difference.
This result actually makes some sense to me: defense so frequently comes down to effort and focus, and that energy might be easier to maintain when you're playing in your building with your fans. Back-to-back games, when the body has less rest, also are more likely to come on the road, the sluggishness probably hurts more on the defensive end. On the other hand, the act of shooting is more of a repeatable skill: these players have shot hundreds of thousands of jump shots in their lives, and probably is affected less by changes in support. Refereeing may also be a critical factor here.
That all being said: with the league's second-best defense and fourteenth-ranked offense so far in this young season, the Jazz have started out 3-1 on the road in the first half of those aforementioned 8 road games. They've done it on the back of good defense. The same was true last year, when the Jazz actually had the same road record as the playoff-bound Washington Wizards and New Orleans Pelicans (17-24). For such a young team, the Jazz have played very well on the road.
Which is to say, maybe they're escaping the trappings that hurt other teams while they travel. They're still bringing 100% effort and focus, and Quin Snyder's flexible rotations are keeping the team relatively fresh in these games. These are just guesses, but whatever it is, it's worked on the road so far.
Now the key for the franchise is becoming the world-beaters they once were at home. Yes, the heights of a 38-3 home record, like the Jazz had in their first final year of 1996-97, is probably out of the picture. But as recently as 2012-13, the Jazz put up a 30-11 home record. Approaching that figure should be the Jazz's goal if they want to make the playoffs this season.
