How The Utah Jazz Utilize Their Best Pick-And-Roll Duos

Among basketball traditionalists, you’re liable to hear a phrase down the lines of, “Points in the first quarter count the same as points in the final two minutes.”

Here’s the thing: They actually don’t.

Okay, from a purely technical standpoint that’s an accurate statement. A layup counts for two points no matter when it’s scored.

But when it comes to a team’s chances of winning the game – you know, the thing we care about during athletic competition – points and baskets are not all created equal.

Per inpredictable.com’s Win Probability Calculator, a team that makes a bucket to go up two points midway through the first quarter of a game has an average win probability of 52.9%. If that same team scores that same basket to go up two with 90 seconds left in the fourth quarter? They’re over a 70% favorite to win.

This is a theme you see reflected in the way most teams play within a given game, from coaching rotations to play calls to on-court intensity. There’s a reason no coach in their right mind plays the bench during crunch time of a tight game; teams naturally get the ball in the hands of their best guys and go to their most reliable sets.

A couple Utah Jazz pick-and-roll combinations – and when they’re used within games – help illustrate the point at hand.

When it comes to the common looks the Jazz rely on for the bulk of most games, Utah’s two longest-tenured players stand alone. The Joe Ingles-Rudy Gobert PNR combination is not only the team’s most lethal in big doses, it’s one of the best in the entire league.

Per advanced tracking data supplied by a source, the Ingles-Gobert combination has run 296 pick-and-rolls that ended in a shot, shooting foul, turnover or pass to an immediate shooter this season. They’ve scored 1.13 points per chance here, which ranks fourth among 72 high-volume combinations in the NBA (minimum 150 possessions).

They have so many ways to hurt you. Ingles loves getting to his left hand, where he’ll smoke lumbering big men who aren’t positioned properly with simple bounce passes:

Overplay that, and he’ll hit you with the now-legendary Ingles pass-fake.

That this still works so consistently is a testament to Ingles’ acting and the degree to which Gobert terrifies opposing centers. Derrick Favors spent five years playing alongside Ingles; he probably watched this exact move happen five feet away from him several hundred times. But Ingles still got him with it in the first quarter of their first matchup as opponents, because of course he did:

When teams eventually relent and bring a third man in to help clog this up, Ingles has the chops to make them pay. He’s improved his ability to find the right kick-outs significantly this year; Jazz players are shooting 45% on threes following a pass out from an Ingles-Gobert pick-and-roll, per tracking data.

That number is on a small sample and prone to variance, but a look at these plays showcases just how much attention these two draw and how open their teammates are as a result.

Bojan Bogdanovic is one of the NBA’s best three-point shooters, canning over 50% of his wide open (no defender within six feet) looks so far this year. He’s not someone you want to leave, even if he missed that particular look.

But the Heat, a great defensive team, left him open long enough to tie his shoes on that play because they were so preoccupied with Ingles and Gobert. Ingles’ pass was actually pretty bad, so it might have looked a bit tighter on video – look how far any Miami defender was from Bogdanovic as the pass got in the air:

Okay, so you definitely can’t let Ingles get to his left. Right?

Wrong, at least this year. Ingles made no secret of his desire to improve his ability to go to his right hand over the offseason after the Rockets shaded him heavily in last year’s postseason loss, and the emphasis was evident in his summer FIBA play.

It’s shown this year, and then some. Ingles has actually been more efficient running pick-and-roll to the right than to the left, per tracking data, even though he still prefers to go left and does it more often. The gap is even more pronounced when Gobert is the screener.

When teams get too exaggerated in taking away his left, he simply shrugs, waits for Gobert to set the re-screen and fires away in their faces:

Ingles is shooting 37.5% on pullup threes this year, easily high enough to punish this approach consistently.

What about switching? Gobert doesn’t have much of a post game, even if he’s improved here in recent years, so it seems viable.

The issue: Tracking data shows Ingles has obliterated centers in isolation over the last three years, scoring over 1.2 points per chance on over 100 such possessions. That’s even worse than just playing the pick-and-roll straight up and hoping for the best.

Late in tight games, though, the arithmetic starts to change a bit. Teams can load up on the Ingles-Gobert look if they know it’s coming; a team like the aforementioned Heat, for instance, could stick Jimmy Butler on Ingles and Bam Adebayo on Gobert – neither end of that switch figures to be too profitable for the Jazz.

It’s in situations like that Quin Snyder busts out his trump card: Bogdanovic screening for Donovan Mitchell.

The Jazz go to this set more often than any other pick-and-roll duo in “clutch” time (final five minutes, score within five), and almost religiously in the very tightest moments. A few teams blitzed Mitchell out of it early in the season, resulting in big threes from Bogdanovic like this one to help close one of the year’s best wins over Philadelphia:

The league pretty quickly realized that wasn’t going to work, though, and they started placing comparable defenders on both players and switching. If Mitchell’s original defender here is small enough, the Jazz might pivot to a Bogdanovic post-up, an area where he’s continued to be extremely efficient abusing littler guys despite only doing so occasionally.

In other cases, such as Tuesday night in Brooklyn, Mitchell uses the brief adjustment phase on the switch – plus an often-slower defender – to get a step and go to work.

(He did virtually the exact same thing off a couple identical screens from Ingles, a change-of-pace look they’ll bust out every now and then.)

Mitchell has also gotten better at reading the defense overcommitting to him and finding the right pass. Ingles missed the resulting shot, but this was a good decision from Mitchell to find him wide open:

All told, the Mitchell-Bogdanovic two-man game is yielding 1.09 points per chance this season, per tracking data – a hair worse than the dominant Ingles-Gobert unit’s season-long number.

The Jazz run the former throughout games, but nowhere near as often as the latter. They prefer to save heavy usage for the big moments. That’s not only due to how hard it is to guard, but also to keep the wear-and-tear on both guys down – regular switches make those possessions more likely to end in labor-intensive isolations, and unless you’re a superhuman like James Harden, you don’t want to be running those all night 82 times a year.

So while points might all count the same on the scoreboard, all situations are not created equal. The Jazz have the depth and versatility to react appropriately whenever it’s needed.