This Jazz team is more aggressive this year, and it shows at both ends of the court in the victory against the Celtics

1. Donovan Mitchell leads excellent jazz offensive performance

Donovan Mitchell is proving that haters are wrong.

In particular, he drove last semester, pulling Jazz away from the Celtics for pure aggression and target shooting. He had incredible recognition when it was his turn to attack and when the defense of the Celtics was paying close attention to him, leaving someone open. More than anything else, he read the game on the spot and made the right decision every time.

Like, I’m really impressed with this piece. Yes, clearly, this is a big mistake for Boston, simply leaving Bojan Bogdanovic like that open after a time limit. But I think that the previous versions of Mitchell do not take advantage, instead, he just prefers to execute the piece that Quin Snyder elaborated in the time limit. Here, Mitchell has his eyes open and ready to attack with the long pass.

Again, an old version of Mitchell slows down the game here; he loves to take the ball to the court with the game ended late. After a failed free throw, how often do you get a counterattack? But Mitchell and Joe Ingles recognize the opportunity, and then Mitchell attacks in the perfect way to open the English.

He goes on to hit just three prominent shots: all three pull-up shots and an anklebreaker shot that may well be the best move in SportsCenter. He is in a rhythm, at TNT, with the perfect opportunity to continue to increase that point total, proving that the haters are wrong. The defense, again, is focused on one thing, stopping Mitchell.

So what does he do? He pulls the defense and throws it to Rudy Gobert.

That’s what makes this team feel a little different: they really play for each other, and this is largely due to Mitchell’s attitude as the best offensive player on the team.

“The two passes to Rudy, you know, last year, the year before and the year before, I probably don’t play that pass,” said Mitchell. “So, like, this is the progression that I’m seeing in myself. And my teammates are seeing me and they can only trust that. “

Jazz had an offensive rating of 130 today against the eighth best defense of the championship, a team with a lot of perimeter and talent. They didn’t shoot well above average either – it wasn’t a performance by chance. So far, they have answered all possible offensive questions asked at the highest level.

2. Aggression at both ends

I’ve been thinking about the differences between this Jazz team and last year, and I think I’ve identified a big one:

The previous Jazz teams, I think, tried to dissect their opponent. Forgive me for extending a horrible metaphor here, but if Jazz wanted his opponent dead, they asked him to come up to the operating table, put him under anesthesia, remove a scalpel, cut the skin on his chest, remove some ribs, carefully cut through the aorta and all other arteries and veins, and then ripped out the opponent’s heart. At some point, talented opponents thought “wait, I don’t like what’s going on here” and sometimes they slipped away.

This Jazz team takes a more direct approach. They have a machete. If they want the opponent to die, they will start to attack.

They are taking seven more trios per game. They are in transition way More. They totally released Jordan Clarkson to do whatever he wants – that means attack. Even players like Ingles, Royce O’Neale and Miye Oni, who are sometimes reluctant to bid on their careers, are giving up.

Focusing on English for a second; he got 11 trios tonight. But not only that, he also hit the free throw line ten times, the highest in his NBA career. Yes, the Celtics blew the switch a little bit, but do you know how many versions of English are not ready to take advantage, especially with the time on the clock? This version of English does and gets it right.

And on the defensive end, they just go after it more. They are averaging almost two more blocks per game this season than last season, for example. Rudy Gobert is excellent at blocking basketball, but I thought last season, he was a little too happy to play the percentages – yes, a mid-range shot is a bad shot, but he still has a 35% chance of getting in.

Unless you just block it. So there’s a 0% chance.

Because they are more aggressive, they are repeatedly having these game-breaking races that just ruin opponents – like a hack-and-slash video game where you accumulate points by combining attacks. This is not Operation, It is Mortal combat.

I think this is the first time that I have directly discussed arbitration this season. Honestly, for the most part, I think it’s been pretty good this year.

Tonight’s team of Leroy Richardson, Mark Ayotte and Tony Brown was very, very poor. I could have a more detailed list of doubts, but they did a ton of arbitrary sins tonight:

• No consistency from period to period. There were seven combined free-throw attempts in the first half and 34 combined free-throw attempts in the second half. It was absurd in those last two periods and made it a very good game difficult to watch.

• Guessing on calls. The replay was not kind to the referees tonight – he failed to show fouls on several moves to the edge where the referees thought there was contact, but instead, the defensive player took the entire ball. Likewise, there were several times when a player ended up on the floor and the referees kind of assumed that there was a foul on the defensive player.

• Fouls marked after an error or failure. There is no need to look at the result of a tray when deciding to beep. If there was a fault, call one. If not, keep playing.

• Elastic arbitration. I thought it was pretty clear that whistles were more likely to be blown in one direction when the game needed to be kept closed. This was especially true in the third quarter, when I had to bite some of the whistles for Jayson Tatum.

I will say this on a positive note: they did not make their mistake worse by giving a technique to either side, with several players clearly dissatisfied with what was happening on the court. I like that they gave both teams room to maneuver, instead of giving an even bigger show, adding points in one direction or the other.

But overall, it was a frustrating game for fans of both teams – just search on Twitter or read the game’s topics to confirm it. As I said, I think it’s been a good season of refereeing so far, but tonight was an exception.