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SALT LAKE CITY — When Donovan Mitchell was asked for his thoughts on his soon-to-be teammate Jordan Clarkson, he couldn’t say much.
Because he didn’t know much.
“I know he’s a scorer; he can really get going,” Mitchell said. “I don’t know too much but I’m excited to have him. He’s going to add some scoring to our team and I hope he’s ready to go.”
The Jazz swung a deal for Clarkson on Monday as part of a day the team sent a message that enough was enough when it came to their bench struggles.
While there’s some excitement for what the newly signed G League standout Rayjon Tucker can become, it’s Clarkson who will have the burden of trying to immediately elevate a Jazz bench unit that is currently 29th in the league in scoring.
So, with that as the case, being a scorer isn’t a bad place to start.
Clarkson is averaging 14.6 points per game on 44% shooting, and he’s making a career-best 37% of his 3-point attempts this season. He's seventh in scoring among qualified bench players this season — that fact alone should help the Jazz.
But how much is the question?
Outside of one half-season run with the Cavs in 2018, Clarkson has been a scorer on bad teams. But that 28-game run might be a good sign for Jazz fans. Flanked by LeBron James and Co., Clarkson had one of the most efficient stretches of his career.
He averaged 12.6 points and shot 40% from the 3-point line. He fit a role. And he fit it well.
Now, you can also point to Clarkson’s lone playoff run that year as a reason to be less optimistic (in 19 playoff games, he averaged 4.7 points on 30% shooting). But it’s trade day(!); no one wants that negativity.
Clarkson is in the process of putting together one of his best NBA seasons. His 58.1% true shooting percentage is a career-high, he’s turning the ball over at a career-low rate (and he’s always been traditionally a low turnover player) and is shooting 42% on catch-and-shoot 3s — the exact type of shots the Jazz system regularly gets.
He shoots nearly half of his shots from the 3-point line and has been more reluctant to fire away from midrange this season.
All good things.
No, he’s not the best defender or the best playmaker; he’ll have to learn to play in the Jazz's system (something that has proven to be a learning curve for many of players) and Utah may have traded him at the height of his value.
But it was still a pretty minimal cost — Dante Exum had his believers, but he wasn’t even in Utah’s rotation — and the Jazz got one of the better bench scorers in the league out of it.
It appears, too, that Clarkson will fit in with the suddenly ever-changing, but still close, Jazz locker room. Utah’s roster has been overhauled this season, but the camaraderie that has defined the Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell-led teams remains intact, (even if this particular trade is tough for Clarkson's former teammates.)
“I fell to the ground,” Cavs forward Kevin Love told Cleveland.com about his reaction to the trade. “This one hurts for me. That is my guy. We just hit it off when he got here a few years ago. He became a really close friend of mine. It’s really tough.”
The Jazz made the trade official on Tuesday morning, pending physicals. That means Clarkson’s Utah debut could come as soon as Thursday against Portland.
That’s when Mitchell and everyone could start to learn a little more about their new teammate.
