Four things the Utah Jazz should try in order to jump start the team

Get Derrick Favors more involved on offense

Remember those days when there were debates about who the best player on the Utah Jazz was and one of the main guys in the thick of contention for such a title was Derrick Favors? Man, that feels like such a long time ago.

After a forgettable 2016-17 campaign which saw Derrick Favors hobbled by injuries all season long and truly ineffective for the better part of the year, several Jazz fans wondered if the once promising big man would ever get back to his effective ways. In the 2015-16 season, the best of Derrick’s career, the big man put up 16.4 points and 8.1 rebounds per game. Many hoped that with improved health, he could return to that level of play.

Unfortunately, such has yet to be the case as Favors is scoring just 10.7 points and grabbing an atrocious 4.7 rebounds per game (a career-low). However, there’s also a few crucial differences between this year’s Favors and that of 2015-16.

First of all, Derrick is playing nearly six less minutes per game. That’s not a huge margin, but still enough to make a difference. Secondly, Favors is currently putting up just 8.9 field goal attempts per game, whereas two seasons ago, he was putting up 13.1. Ironically enough, he’s actually also shooting better this season at a career-high 53.1 percent clip despite the fact that he’s attempting to add a three-point shot to his repertoire and is converting on just 26.7 percent of 1.4 attempts per game.

In other words, Favors looks the healthiest he has in two years and despite appearing to be underperforming on the surface, he’s shooting the best percentage of his career meaning that the true problem here is that he’s being vastly underused. For one more bit of proof on that, in 2015-16, his usage percentage was 23.9 percent – the fourth highest on the team. So far this season, that figure is at just 18.8 percent, which is seventh on the team.

Favors is too talented and, again, despite some misleading numbers, playing too well to be that underutilized. Therefore, the Jazz absolutely have to find a way to get him more involved in the offense, run more designed plays for him and get him to be a larger contributor. Favors can bring a lot to this Utah squad, but his teammates have to instill him with confidence and allow him to be the force inside that he proved capable of being just two seasons ago.

With the departure of Gordon Hayward this offseason, Derrick Favors was one of the guys that many believed would help step up to shoulder an offensive load for the Jazz. So far, it hasn’t so much been that he’s incapable of doing that, it’s been that he hasn’t been granted sufficient opportunity to do it.

Once again, there’s no guarantee that throwing Favors more solidly in the mix will actually work to that degree. Perhaps the 2015-16 version of Derrick Favors is long gone and what we’re seeing now is truly about all we’ll really get. But at this point, it doesn’t matter. Something has to be done and attempting to tap into the previously dominant version of Favors is a better bet than continuing to let him and his teammates putter on both ends of the floor.