Surprise, Surprise, the Utah Jazz will continue to hang their hat on defense

One message that has been overwhelmingly clear from the Utah Jazz as the new season is reignited is that defense will continue to be the team’s calling card.

Monday’s Utah Jazz Media Day marked the end of the offseason, the start of training camp and the nearing of yet another NBA campaign. The Utah Jazz exhibited high confidence throughout all of their media day interviews and all signs continue to indicate that Jazz fans will be in for an exhilarating year.

And while there were several positive takeaways to glean from Monday’s comments, one of the things that stood out significantly to me was the fact that, despite plenty of new faces on the team, the Utah Jazz aren’t about to change their mantra.

In other words, defense is still going to be their calling card.

Rudy Gobert said the Jazz could have the best defense in the league. Derrick Favors talked about how daunting of a defensive pair he and Rudy could be. Donovan Mitchell said that contributing defensively was his main point of emphasis. Quin Snyder said that asserting defense is the team’s top priority. The team’s potential for elite defense was brought up by practically every player.

In short, this is going to be a lock-down defensive squad that will look to batter its opponents into the ground with a relentless and suffocating defense. Playing the Jazz for 48 minutes (particularly in the higher altitude of Salt Lake City) is going to be a nightmare for any team in the league.

But the emphasis on defense wasn’t just training camp talk. With practice getting underway on Tuesday, establishing an identity on the side of the court that’s often contrived as less entertaining was the focus right off the bat. As was reported by Tony Jones of the Salt Lake Tribune, the Jazz spent the majority of their first practice working solely on defense.

Snyder had the following to say about Day 1 with the new squad:

"“We worked a lot on defense and rotations. The first day is always a step. It’s a first step. We have a lot of work to do, but we say that almost every year. The important thing is we finally get to focus on practice.”"

Given that the Jazz have established themselves as one of the stingiest defensive squads in the league, which is an attribute that has already led them to being a tough match-up each and every night, it stands to reason that such would continue to be the case. Although the Jazz may end up with a middling offense next year, they have every tool to become an absolutely elite defense, beginning with Rudy Gobert as the anchor in the paint to several lock-down wings in both the first and second units as well as underrated defensive bigs like Favors, Udoh and Jonas Jerebko.

In other words, the team that led the league in opponent points per game last season and was third in the league in defensive rating figures to be even more unforgiving on that end of the floor in 2017-18.

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In a league that is trending towards high-flying offenses, three-point shooting barrages and little grit on the opposite end of the floor, the Jazz will look to continue to buck the trend with an unrelenting defense that should punish opposing teams.

Stifling opponents has long been the calling card of Quin Snyder and the Utah Jazz, thus, with a squad that is even more equipped to fit that mold, it comes as little surprise that the Jazz will continue to hang their hat on defense. And as they do so, much of the optimistic remarks that came out of media day that may seem like little more than speculation at this point, should indeed transform into reality once the season gets underway.