Every week during the regular season begins here at SCH with the Salt City Seven, a septet of recurring features that let us relive the biggest moments, key performances and hot issues in Jazzland from various angles. Check in every week for the quotes, stats, plays and performances that tell the stories from the last 168 hours in the world of the Jazz.
The Jazz have now lost seven of nine as they've faced a bunch of quality teams lately, and it's not likely to get a bunch easier from here.
It's a great example of why, this early in the season, processing a team's macro quality just as a function of their record is always a bit tricky. For a while, draft-centric Jazz fans were worried about the team's early success pushing them out of the protected range on the pick they conditionally owe the Thunder. Turns out, the Jazz's 5-8 start mostly had to do with getting fat early against the NBA's middle class and dregs, plus one overtime win against a surprisingly good Phoenix team.
So instead of analyzing the Jazz overall at 5-11, let's take Ken Clayton's advice and analyze Utah's games against three distinct tranches of NBA teams.
2-2 vs. sub-.400 teams
Utah opened the season with a shellacking of the Clippers and then later torched the shorthanded Pacers with similar ferocity. Those have been the only games Utah has won by more than a 2-possession margin.
They also lost in Sacramento (by 1) and in Charlotte (by 23).
Winning half (or so) of these games going forward is probably a reasonable expectation. Maybe less if it turns out that some of these teams eventually try harder. The Pelicans and Clippers, for example, don't own their draft picks and have no reason to fully pull the plug. Mavs and Kings brass still insist the goal is to be as competitive as possible, and the Grizzlies are going through some weirdness that might blow over eventually. That leaves the Wizards, Pacers, Nets and Hornets in this group as the teams most likely to be following lottery odds all winter and spring.
2-1 vs. .500-ish teams (within 1.5 games)
There are eight teams in the NBA all within a game and a half of .500. Utah has only faced three of them. They squeezed by the Bulls in the final second of 2OT in a home game, and beat the Celtics on a last-second putback. They lost narrowly to Blazers, also at home.
Those three and their peers in this group (the Bucks, Magic, Warriors, Sixers and Knicks) are trying to win. In fact, some of them will likely wind up in the top third by season's end. Wins against this group should be looked at as nice surprises, and will likely be hard-fought.
1-8 vs. Against over-.600 teams
Ken does thirds, but sometimes the cutoffs happen in weird places. There's not a huge difference between, say, 11-6 Phoenix and 10-6 Minnesota. So instead let's look here at the 12 teams that are over .600, meaning they're on pace for 50+ wins.
Utah has just one win against such a team: a home victory in OT against the Suns behind Lauri Markkanen's 51-point eruption.
Otherwise, they just haven't had success against this group. They've lost their road games against this group by an average of 21.8 points: -22 in Phoenix, -11 in Detroit, -40 at Minnesota, and -14 in Los Angeles. They've gotten closer in some of their home games against this group: -7 against the Wolves, -10 when the Hawks visited, then this week's 32-point drubbing by the Thunder and 2-point loss to the Lakers.
Looking ahead
Put another way, their regulation record against teams outside the bottom 10 is 1-9-2... with the one regulation win coming at the last second.
Stat site Cleaning the Glass has a similar mechanism where you can filter a team's success by how they have done against high-, low- and medium-quality teams. Their site tells the same story: Utah has a respectable net rating of -6.0 (outside of garbage time) overall, but against the top third of the league by efficiency differential, Utah's efficiency drops to -16.3.
This analysis matters because Utah is now three games into a brutal stretch of their schedule in which 10 of their final 17 games of the calendar year are against those elite teams. (There are two games yet to be scheduled for mid-December.)
Here is the Jazz's remaining 2025 slate broken down the same way. CAPS means home game, lowercase means road, and the asterisk signals a back-to-back:
- Against over-.600: HOU, HOU*, OKC, LAL, den, DET, sas*
- Against .500-ish: gsw*, nyk*, ORL, BOS
- Against sub-.400: SAC, bkn, MEM*
Utah will probably be favored in Brooklyn, and might be favored against the Kings. Utah will be at home and have a rest advantage, but the Kings just got Keegan Murray back. The Jazz and Grizzlies will both be on a back-to-back when they meet, which likely makes that something close to a "pick 'em" game. Their other 11 (scheduled) games over this span will be tall orders.
All of which is a long way to say: brace yourselves. The Jazz could easily wake up on New Year's Day with something like an 8-24 record.
"(Keyonte George) is one of the hardest working dudes I've ever seen... It's beautiful to see him hoop like this. It makes me smile."
-Jazz forward Taylor Hendricks on the improvement of fellow 2023 draft pick George
With roughly 20% of the season played, George's improvement is starting to look more and more real. He was probably Utah's top performer over the last eight nights, scoring 33, 34, 20 and 27 to pace the Jazz with 28.5 per outing.
The primary features of his steady improvement have been his paint finishing and his free throw success. He shoots as many free throws per 100 possessions as guys like Cade Cunningham and Donovan Mitchell, and he has the best percentage of any of the 44 guys who have taken at least 70 total freebies.
But it's his 75% finishing in the restricted area and 48.9% in the paint non-RA that are really transforming his game the most. Both are career highs by far, and he's creating 7.4 shot oppportunities in those two zones each night. He loves little slot drives, and he has just enough guile as a driver to get separation through a series of speed changes, wrong-foot takeoffs and the like. He also is driving to finish, as opposed to the last couple of years when it often felt he was primarily searching for a whistle.
There are still areas to improve. He still gets hunted on defense (ask the Lakers). His off-the-bounce three shooting (22.9%) needs work if he's going to be an elite pick-and-roll operator. And there are still times when for a stretch he gets a little dribbley and the pace of his decision-making slows.
But having headroom to continue enhancing things is hardly a damning thing to say about a freshly minted 22-year-old. And with 23, 4 and 7 averages, there's no reason to ignore the Most Improved Player talk.
38
More Keyonte: the Jazz guard missed a free throw in Sunday's game for the first time since November 5. He made his last two in Detroit, then had seven perfect games from the stripe before canning two more against LAL for a total of 38 straight.
-30
We talked about this a couple of SC7s ago, but Walker Kessler's absence isn't just affecting the defense. The rim pressure he provided helped the Jazz offensively. Take the first of the two Laker games, for example: Utah got outscored by 18 in the paint and 12 more at the free throw line. That's a big deficit to overcome.
17
After Sunday's pair of highlight flushes, 17 of Ace Bailey's 57 career buckets have been dunks. Among rookies, only big man Ryan Kalkbrenner has more (28). Utah's most prolific dunker is still Lauri Markkanen (27), who by the way needs just 44 more games (60 total) at his current pace to repeat his historic feat of 100+ dunks and 200+ threes in a season.
123-69
That is the score of Friday's Jazz-Thunder matchup... if you just look at the 37:03 span from 2:50 in the first to 1:47 in the fourth. The 54-point swing from Utah's max lead of 18 to trailing by 36 was the biggest spread in a Jazz game this year.
.335
Cody Williams is on pace to play roughly 700 minutes. That would be the most ever played by a player with this low of a true shooting figure, although obviously he has 66 more games to improve it. His rotation minutes at this point are mostly due to his on-ball defense (he has been holding players 5% below expected FG%). But man, here's a guy who needs to see some shots go down.
It was a less glitzy week for for Markkanen, who had "just" (heavily sarcastic air quotes here) 70 points in three games.
But the Jazz still know how to weaponize his gravity. Like here:
Luka Doncic comes all the way over to shade Lauri, meaning there's nobody to help George's man if they put the unguarded Nurkic in pick-and-roll action. Markkanen quickly recognizes the advantage and points to Bailey to make the pass, but the cool is that the rookie already made the read! Freeze frame and you'll see that when #23 points, Bailey is already cocking back to make the pass. Now there's nobody on the other side of Nurk's little blind pig/flare pitch action, except for a scrambling Doncic.
Markkanen's ability to draw a crowd helped Utah in the Lakers-Jazz rematch a few nights later, too:
First, look at the crowd around the Finn when he comes off the Nurkic screen. His guy, Nurk's guy and a stunter all mob Markkanen, who smartly treats like this a regular P&R attack. Nurk only has to beat a little guy (or frankly kick to Bailey, who's also open). And then later in the game, LeBron James switches off Markkanen but is still so concerned with him that he lets Svi Mykhailiuk slide behind him for a layup.
Sadly we only have consolation prizes to give out this week, and they honestly could have all gone to the same guy.
Strong in defeat:
- Jazz 126, Lakers 140: Keyonte George. George's 34-4-8 were the best Jazz performance, surpassing Markkanen's 31-5-2. Nurkic had an intriguing 10-6-10 line, but in a game that largely came down to paint defense, his 7-for-8 allowed at the rim probably disqualifies him.
- Jazz 112, Thunder 144: Kyle Filipowski. Markkanen and George were silly good early, but then the world's best defense adjusted and they both ended with kind of pedestrian (for them) lines: 19-6-3 for Lauri, 20-3-8 for Key. Bailey had a 10-point second half (15 overall), but let's spread the love here and go with Flip, who had 18 overall on 7-for-11 shooting.
- Jazz 106, Lakers 108: Keyonte George. Bailey was peppy in this one and actually had a lot to do with the near-comeback. He stonewalled Luka with a steal that led to a Markkanen fastbreak bucket, then rebounded a miss and assisted a Lauri 3. But George's 27 was probably too much of a storyline to ignore. Markkanen made it to 20 late, but only after some struggled with LAL's top-locking D. Another double-double for Nurkic.
The Jazz end November facing three veteran-led teams.
Monday 11/24 @ Warriors: The Warriors have lost three straight after a 9-6 start. Stephen Curry leads the league in threes taken and made, and he and Jimmy Butler combine for nearly 49 points per outing. Golden State has a +14.0 efficiency differential when those two and Draymond Green are on the floor, but all lineups where even ONE of those three sits have a combined -5.4 per 100.
Friday 11/28 vs. Kings: Zach LaVine is a rounding error away from a 50-40-90 shooting start, but life just got a lot tougher with news of Domantas Sabonis' partially torn meniscus. He'll miss 3-4 weeks at least, which leaves rookie Maxime Raynaud, in-season signee Precious Achiuwa and Jazz alumnus Drew Eubanks as the only real centers on the roster. The good news for them is they just got Keegan Murray back from injury, and then promptly surprised the Nuggets to halt an 8-game losing streak.
Sunday 11/30 vs. Rockets: This is actually the first of a back-to-back series against Kevin Durant's new team, as the Jazz have this matinee matchup and then face them against on Monday evening. The Rockets just had their 5-game win streak snapped by Denver, but overall have the league's most potent offense. Part of that is Durant's excellence (25-5-3 averages) and another star-level year for Alperen Sengun (23-10-7). But also, they are an insane offense rebounding team, grabbing 40% of their own misses.
It's that time of year...
Here's wishing you and yours a very happy Thanksgiving!
