Three things the Utah Jazz absolutely have to fix to find success

Cut down on turnovers BIG TIME

Although the Jazz did a significantly better job of taking care of the ball in their most recent win over the Dallas Mavericks on Monday, they still turned it over 14 times which kept them solidly in dead last in the league in turnovers per game at an atrocious 18.9.

Luckily, Monday’s game was a nice improvement given that prior to that the Jazz were averaging 19.7 turnovers through their first six games and the 14 they had against Dallas paled in comparison to the 24 and 23 they had against the Suns and Lakers, respectively.

Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that Utah’s offense simply isn’t strong enough on its own to also be able to make up for all the turnovers they’ve been committing. With no solidified go-to scorer on the team (despite the hope that Rodney Hood can become that), the Utah Jazz have had to rely heavily on turning defense into offense and sharing the ball immensely in order to put up points.

With that being the case, their margin for error is extremely small and if they’re limiting the number of looks they get at the basket by turning the ball over on top of their already existing struggles to score, there’s just no way that they’ll have the firepower to be a legitimate threat. Utah’s absurd number of giveaways is also producing the second most points off of turnovers in the league thus far (22 per game), so increasing their deficit even more against opponents is no way to aide their middling offense.

Nevertheless, there is some good news in this respect. First of all, the Utah Jazz are in the top half of the league in assists per game, which is an immense improvement over last year where they ranked 28th, and they’re third in the league in steals per game whereas last year they finished 29th.

In other words, they’re doing some good things on both ends of the floor to help counterbalance the excessive turnovers, so if they can just reduce the giveaways in general, it should help swing the stats and results overwhelmingly in their favor.

Not only that, but given that Utah’s offensive struggles were pretty much a given, we all knew that for the Jazz to find success, they’d need to have a simply dominant defense and hope that it would give them somewhat of a cushion offensively. So far they’re looking good in that area as they’re fourth in the league in defensive rating (96.9) and first in opponent points per game (93.1).

Thus, simply put, the Jazz are doing a lot of things right, but turnovers are simply disguising and outweighing their success in other areas. The instant they can get more accustomed to one another and refrain from turning the ball over so frequently, we could very well see this Jazz team take a major leap.