John Collins knows he’ll need to adapt to his role with the Utah Jazz.
John Collins hasn’t looked great in his first two outings with the Utah Jazz. He’s had a hard time getting his shot to fall, and he’s had a few costly turnovers that were quite perplexing to see. Clearly, he’s got some rust to work off.
While most of his teammates were seemingly playing in the FIBA World Cup or Summer League, Collins has been recovering from a pretty nasty finger injury that hindered him all last season. So it’s not surprising at all to see that Collins is struggling.
It’s going to take him time to not only return to form but find a rhythm and groove with his new teammates. And Collins, to his credit, knows this. Speaking to the media this week (via Desert News), Collins admitted he needed to adapt to things.
"It’s pretty difficult in the sense of feeling like a rookie again. Not in terms of obviously my experience in the NBA, but it’s a new home, new coaches, new everything, new teammates, and it’s hard to adjust to new.I have to adapt to a bunch of things that I wasn’t used to doing in Atlanta, and that’s part of the game, and I’m embracing it because it’s a new chapter for me and it also allows my game to grow."
And of course, he needs to adapt. He went from a team with a ball-dominant star in Trae Young, who would take 20 shots a game to a team that is far more balanced. It’s going to take time for him to not only understand his new role on a new team, with new teammates but to recover and rebound from a pretty serious injury.
This isn’t a new or shocking thing to hear, many fans know this, but some need to be reminded. Collins will bounce back; he’s been around the league long enough to know what to expect from his floor. What his ceiling looks like is an unknown but we know he’s not going to have a lot of 1-5 games, where he’s throwing the ball into the stands.
The preseason doesn’t matter, but it does. Players need this time to get used to one another and reacclimated to the speed and pace of an NBA game. But it doesn’t matter because players won’t be given their full workloads and a lot of what you’re going to be seeing is some form of experimentation.
Be it with rotations, plays or bench talent getting bigger roles to see what can be expected out of them at this juncture. If we’re 15 games into the regular season and Collins still looks a bit lost and unsure of himself, then we need to take a longer look at things.