The Utah Jazz enter the 2021-22 season with championship aspirations. After finishing the 2020-21 season at a league-best 52-20, playoff success is suddenly the only meaningful measure of this team’s performance. With one of the deepest rosters in the league, fans of the club deserve to hold high expectations.
In fact, this Jazz team is so deep that identifying its five most important players is a surprisingly difficult task. For many teams, it’s as simple as looking to the starting five. For the Jazz, that’s not necessarily an effective method.
That’s because the Utah Jazz rostered both the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year in Jordan Clarkson, and the league’s runner-up in Joe Ingles. Between Quin Snyder’s platoon of wings and guards, the designation of starter is almost arbitrary.
The operative word being almost.
Donovan Mitchell, Rudy Gobert and Mike Conley Jr. are all entrenched in their starter status’. No surprises there. Mitchell is the offensive hub, Gobert is the defensive anchor, and Conley Jr. is the all-important game manager. Outside of Salt Lake City’s big 3, however, it’s hard to make absolute claims about who the most important players to the Jazz’s championship cause will be in the upcoming season.
That won’t stop us from trying.
Here, we’ll rank the 5 most important players for the Utah Jazz heading into the 2021-22 season. We’ll be looking at some of the usual metrics: Box Plus/Minus (BPM), Player Efficiency Rating (PER) and Value Over Replacement Player (VORP). With that said, we won’t strictly adhere to those measures either. After all, numbers can be noisy, and sometimes it can be best to trust your gut.
Or not. Either way, you’re not here for life advice. You’re here to see the five most important players on the Utah Jazz entering the 2021-22 season.
In case you’re in the process of re-entering society after a decade spent living in a remote cabin somewhere off of Hell’s Backbone Road, here’s a tidbit: the NBA is in the midst of a three-point revolution.
Last season, the Utah Jazz were the vanguard of that revolution. They attempted a league-high 43.1 triples per contest. That they managed to do so with a non-spacer consistently manning the center position between Rudy Gobert and Derrick Favors is even more impressive.
Bojan Bogdanovic made a strong contribution to the Jazz’s ability to hoist so many deep balls. He managed 6.4 attempts per contest, drilling an efficient 39.0% of those attempts. Furthermore, Bogey willingly played the role of pure floor-spacer, as a remarkable 96.1% of those made threes were assisted-on.
To some, that statistic may qualify as a weakness, as many fans are more impressed by players who create their own shots. That’s legitimate, but for a Utah Jazz team featuring an impressive depth of ball-handling and playmaking between Donovan Mitchell, Mike Conley Jr. and Jordan Clarkson, there is concrete value in a player who is willing to catch-and-shoot at such a substantial rate.
Admittedly, Bogdanovic was more effective in 2019-20, his first season as a Jazzman. Between the two seasons, his points per game dropped from 20.2 to 17.0, and correspondingly, his three-point accuracy dipped from 41.4% to that 39.0% mark.
Quin Snyder will still live with a stagnation in Bogey’s 2020-21 statistical output this season. If he can regain his 2019-20 form, we may end up having ranked him a position too low on this list.
Some Utah Jazz fans reading this article could potentially be upset about this placement. How can we say that Joe Ingles is more important to the Jazz’s cause if Bojan Bogdanovic plays the same position, and typically receives the starting nod?
Even more astute observers may have an additional gripe. It isn’t difficult to guess who the top 3 players in this article will be. So, how can we say that Joe Ingles is more important than Jordan Clarkson, when both men led Quin Snyder’s second unit last year, and only the latter was awarded the Sixth Man of the Year?
Well, the advanced stats mostly tell us that this placement is accurate. Ingles bested Bogdanovic in all 3 of the markers we identified at the beginning of this article. His BPM of 3.4 decimates Bogey’s -0.8, his VORP of 2.5 is significantly stronger than Bogdanovic’s 0.7, and his PER of 15.9 comfortably edges Bogdanovic’s 14.0.
Meanwhile, Clarkson did surpass Ingles in PER last year, with a mark of 17.1. We’re still comfortable with our decision here. PER notoriously favors players who rack up stats (as, relevantly, does the Sixth Man of the Year award) and Clarkson does more of that by virtue of his role. Not to be discredited, Clarkson’s 18.4 points per game off of the Utah Jazz bench were critical to the team’s success.
Nonetheless, there’s a reason Ingles’ other two advanced metrics heavily outweighed Clarkson’s.
The reigning Sixth Man of the Year was fairly mediocre in terms of BPM and VORP last season, posting figures of 1.4 and 1.1 respectively. Those are acceptable numbers, but they lag behind Ingles’. In all likelihood, we can attribute this discrepancy to Ingles’ considerably more well-rounded game. He’s a better defender, passer and floor-spacer.
It’s a little cliche to say that a player “does a little bit of everything”. With that said, Joe Ingles really does do a little bit of everything for the Utah Jazz. For that reason, we consider him their fourth most important player entering the 2021-22 season.
If you’re still picking your jaw up off the floor from Ingles’ placement, here’s a spoiler: there won’t be any more surprises to be found here.
(Also, an aside: stop underrating Joe Ingles).
Fans of the Utah Jazz know who the three most important players on this team are. What some may not realize is that Mike Conley Jr. had a strong case for a placement above either of the next two players listed in this article over the 2020-21 season.
We’ll compare him to Donovan Mitchell, as a comparison between Conley Jr and Rudy Gobert veers too closely into apples/oranges territory. Over 2020-21, Conley Jr.’s BPM was significantly higher than Mitchell’s, at 4.4 to 3.5. Meanwhile, Mitchell barely edged the veteran floor general in VORP, at 2.5 to 2.4. Mitchell did enjoy a significant advantage in PER, at 21.3 to 19.2, but again, PER is a metric that particularly favors players who rack up basic counting stats.
That’s more-so Mitchell’s responsibility than Conley Jr.’s, and obviously, we’re designating Mitchell as the more important player here. However, that does little to sell Conley Jr.’s value short. He averaged 16.2 points per game while shooting 41.2% in 6.6 three-point attempts per game last season, with 6.0 assists per game to boot. Those numbers are particularly striking in the context of his 23.1% usage rate: a modest number for a player of Conley Jr.’s ilk.
That’s the beauty of Conley Jr.’s game. He can dominate the ball if Quin Snyder asks him to, or slip comfortably into an off-ball, floor-spacing role and function as an elite supporting player while Mitchell dictates the offense. His 0.9 Defensive Box Plus Minus (DBPM) from 2020-21 won’t earn him Defensive Player of the Year consideration, but it’s a nice figure from a 33-year-old, 6’1 point guard.
The Utah Jazz could not ask anything more from Conley Jr. in 2021-22: besides, of course, good health.
Much has been made of Utah Jazz star Rudy Gobert’s inability to close-out three-point attempts in the Western Conference semi-finals vs the Los Angeles Clippers in the 2021 NBA Playoffs. Arguably, too much.
However valid concerns about Gobert’s portability as a defender may be, he’s a 3x Defensive Player of the year for a reason. The recipient of last year’s award, Gobert earned his hardware with an elite 101 Defensive Rating. That may be slightly short of the historic 99 figure he’s posted throughout several seasons, but it was still the highest in the National Basketball Association last season.
The aptly-named Stifle Tower’s importance to his Utah Jazz squad is well-documented. Last season, opponents shot 17.1 shots per game within less than 5 feet of the rim against Gobert, and converted on 56.8% of those looks. The only player to come close to guarding that volume of lay-up and dunk attempts with that level of success was Indiana Pacer Myles Turner. He held opponents to 56.6% accuracy on 20.9 attempts per game.
That’s impressive, and Turner may himself have garnered some Defensive Player of the Year consideration had he not been limited to 47 games due to injury. However, it’s also worth noting that his 108 Defensive Rating was significantly worse than Gobert’s high mark.
Gobert may never join the aforementioned three-point revolution, and he may never defend three-point attempts at a high level either. Regardless, his elite rim protection is a defensive system in-and-of-itself, and Utah Jazz head coach Quin Snyder will inevitably continue taking advantage of it.
Here’s where we willingly throw away the advanced metrics: we already know Donovan Mitchell is the most important player on the Utah Jazz.
That’s the weight a player carries with a team-leading 26.4 points per game. As valuable as Gobert’s rim protection, Conley Jr.’s IQ, Ingles’ versatility and Bogdanovic’s floor-spacing are to this squad, the game, as they say, is ultimately about a bucket.
There’s not a player on this roster Quin Snyder is more likely to turn to in pursuit of one. Furthermore, Mitchell isn’t just the player whose most important to the Jazz’s present, he’s also the most important player to their future.
At 25, Mitchell’s development has been ahead of schedule since he averaged 20.5 points per game as a rookie. He’s been the most significant part of this Utah Jazz offensive attack ever since. Mitchell uses his athletic gifts in tandem with a series of shifty, evasive maneuvers to get to the rim and finish at will. Furthermore, he’s a consistently efficient three-point shooter as well, shooting 38.6% on 8.7 attempts per game last season.
His ability to score from any part of the floor makes him the focal point of every opposing team’s scouting report. That makes him a unique challenge when flanked by the kind of supporting cast we’ve already highlighted in this article.
The depth of this Utah Jazz team makes them a challenging proposition for any opposing defense. It’s notable that in this ranking of the five most important players on the roster, we did not include reigning Sixth Man of the Year Jordan Clarkson, or 3-and-D glue guy Royce O’Neale. Quin Snyder’s top 7 players should be the envy of teams across the National Basketball Association.