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SALT LAKE CITY — When the Utah Jazz acquired Shelvin Mack at the trade deadline in a three-team deal, most Jazz fans were underwhelmed.
After all the talk about acquiring a starting point guard, a difference-maker in the quest for a playoff spot, the Jazz acquired a player who'd been waived twice in his career, came to his former team on a 10-day contract and was acquired for just a future second-round pick? That doesn't seem good enough.
Well, it has been. Since Mack joined the Jazz, he's played 14 games. In that time, he's averaging 12.5 points per game, 5.3 assists and 3.9 rebounds in just under 30 minutes of play each night. That's enough to put him 22nd in scoring (eighth in FG percentage and second in 3P percentage), 20th in assists and 12th in rebounding among NBA point guards. That doesn't sound like much for the Jazz, but it represents a huge improvement over their other point guards who clearly weren't starting caliber.
It's not just the basic counting stats that help Mack's case, though. When he is on the floor, the Jazz are significantly better. Take a look at this, for example:
When Mack is on the floor, the Jazz's shooting percentages, rebounding percentages, assist percentages and overall offensive rating ago up significantly. The Jazz also have their best offensive rating as a team (106.8) when he is on the floor.And the defense works really well with Mack also. The Jazz allow 99 points per 100 possessions with Mack on the floor, compared with 102.2 points per 100 possessions overall. Sure, much of that is because he shares a lot of time with Derrick Favors and Rudy Gobert. Also, remember it means he's been playing against the opposing starters, and he's done a pretty solid job of staying in front of his man and executing the Jazz's scheme.
The result has been the league's second-best starting lineup since the trade deadline. Only the Warriors' starting five outplays it. The lineup of Mack, Rodney Hood, Gordon Hayward, Favors and Gobert outscores opponents by 15.7 points per 100 possessions while on the floor.
Mack's also clearly improved his fit with the team in that 14-game stretch. At the beginning, there was clearly a disconnect between Mack and the Jazz's big men. In Atlanta, Mack had played with a lot of pick-and-pop bigs. That's an easier read for a point guard. It's essentially a two-on-two read because teams can't really send help to the mostly stationary big men. Even when the Hawks ran the traditional pick-and-roll, at least one of the Hawks' big men stayed on the perimeter to give room for the play to develop.
That's not the case in Utah where Favors and Gobert don't have 3-point range. That means it's always a pick-and-roll, even if it's just a short roll for Favors. On those sorts of plays, the entire defense gets involved in stopping the roll man and the point guard coming off the screen, and it's a much more complicated read. Mack's done it before, but it takes some time to adjust to the timing of the big men involved.
We're starting to see that timing come together. That's been the biggest reason behind Mack's recent assist uptick. He's picked up 10 each in his last two games plus eight assists in three of the six games before that.
This is an incredibly sad but true stat: No other Jazz point guard has had eight assists in a game this season. Mack's done it five times since he's been traded for in only 14 chances.
I thought Jazz radio play-by-play man David Locke put it really well in his postgame article Thursday night: "The offense is based on getting an advantage and building on it. Mack is the first (point guard) who is doing exactly that."
Raul Neto and Trey Burke are too small to really attack the advantages created for them in the paint, but Mack's ability to finish near the rim out to 15 feet changes that.
Is Mack's impact sustainable? From the outside, Mack's not going to shoot 45 percent from 3-point range moving forward. His career (a lifetime 32.9 percent shooter) just hasn't shown any evidence of that. At some point, regression to the mean is going to happen, and he's not the second-best 3-point shooting PG in the NBA. But everything else is basically within career norms, and I don't think there's a big reason to expect it to decline.
Yes, that a player with Mack's resume is making such an impact on the Jazz is a pretty incriminating sign for the point guard situation earlier in the year. But looking forward to next season, the rotation starts to fit together. Dante Exum could be the presumptive starter, developing to become a star in the way the Jazz have envisioned. Mack can be the capable backup, providing good defense and a different type of scoring punch off the bench. Neto would be the third stringer, not the starter he was for a majority of the 2015-16 season.
The Jazz's point guard position still isn't quite a strength, but it, at least, doesn't look like a wild liability, and a simple acquisition for a future second-round pick changed it all.
