Utah Jazz worked back – and it got a lot better

In addition to a brief blip on the road against the Los Angeles Clippers on Friday, Utah Jazz was absolutely rolling evening. Including Monday night’s victory over the Charlotte Hornets – in which Utah buried Charlotte with a 28-point franchise record – Jazz has won 10 of its last 11 championships and 21 of the last 23. In doing so, they became only the 69th. team in NBA history to recite such a race at any point in the season. Suffice to say that Jazz is currently on a rare wave of success.

Utah tops the classic FiveThirtyEight version of the Elo power ratings, representing the teams that have played the best so far this season based on the results of the games. Jazz overtook the Los Angeles Lakers for first place on February 17, as part of a race that saw them earn almost 150 Elo points in the first 31 games of the season – rising from a pre-season 1542 rating to 1692 now . Among NBA teams since the ABA merger in 1976, this is the 11th highest number of qualifying points any team has ever won in the first 31 games of an NBA season:

Looking at the other teams on this list of Elo’s biggest winners, a theme emerges: most of them added a lot of talent before making their races early in the season. The 2007-08 Celtics, for example, had a low preseason rating based on the 2006-07 edition which was 24-58 without Kevin Garnett or Ray Allen (and with Paul Pierce playing in just 47 games). The 2007-08 championship winning team had just 50 percent of their minutes and 49 percent of their RAPTOR wins over the common substitution with the 2006-07 bad squad, which helps explain Boston’s sudden rise. The same can be said for Suns 2004-05 (which added Steve Nash and Quentin Richardson), Nuggets 2003-04 (Andre Miller, Carmelo Anthony) and Spurs 1989-90 (David Robinson, Terry Cummings) – all near the top of the Elo’s most improved list.

What’s unique about today’s jazz is that they’ve gotten a lot better, despite no changing things a lot on last year’s list. 91.6% of Utah’s 2020-21 minutes are being filled by players from the 2019-20 team, and 100.5% of the team’s WAR is being created by remnants from last season. (Participation may exceed 100 percent for WAR because of negative contributors.) Utah ranks first in both categories in the top 20 above, well above the respective 61 percent averages and 68 percent for the other teams in the list.

In other words, it is strange to see a team improve so much without messing with their list to make it happen. Among WAR’s 10 best Jazz players, only one – Derrick Favors, who played for New Orleans a year ago – was not on Utah’s 2019-20 list. And even it comes with a kind of asterisk. Before being traded to Pelicans in July 2019, Favors spent some or all of his first nine years in the NBA with Utah; he then returned to Jazz as a free agent last November.

With so much cast overlap between seasons, we can really only point to an internal improvement to help explain Utah’s recent rise. While several Jazz goers (like Rudy Gobert and Royce O’Neale) simply maintained a high level of play between seasons, Mike Conley, Jordan Clarkson, Donovan Mitchell, Joe Ingles and Georges Niang increased their RAPTOR ratings by at least 1.5 points per 100 possessions between 2020 and 2021, with Conley improving by an astonishing 10.2 points per 100.

Clarkson was already good offensively last season, but he found another level as an efficient goalkeeper and improved his defense remarkably. Mitchell is just entering its heyday and enjoying its explosive performance in last year’s playoffs. And Conley’s change is nothing short of historic: among players since the merger who have played at least 500 minutes in consecutive seasons, Conley’s 10.2 point improvement is currently in first place, well ahead of De’Andre Atlanta Hunter (who also improved 9.0 points per 100 this season) and Channing Frye’s pre-2021 record of 8.3 points per 100, who played much better after moving from Portland to Phoenix in 2009-10.

It is also worth noting: at 33 this season, Conley is among the oldest players on the most improved list above – along with Alonzo Mourning in 2005-06, he is one of only two players who were 30 or older in the year its drastic improvement. Although Conley is recovering from a 2019-20 season marked by injuries, we would not normally expect a player to increase his performance so much between seasons at Conley’s age.

Conley’s ranking is so supernatural in part because of his own numbers – he is generating a career record of 1.24 points for possession, with a 23% attack rate and has the ninth best defending league steals. But Jazz also plays significantly better with Conley on the court, especially in combination with Gobert; no other combination of two players in the league has a better scoring differential on the court than Conley and Gobert’s +226 mark.

Conley was back on Monday with a +22 plus-minus in his second game since returning from a hamstring injury that kept him out of six games, making four of those 28 trios and helping in four others. But even when they were without their guard, Jazz won all six competitions, with Gobert, Ingles and Clarkson delivering more than 0.16 WAR per game – well above their overall season averages – in that period, and Mitchell playing over +5 points for 100 levels in attack:

As good as Conley was, Jazz showed that it can also do this without him.

Of course, none of these meteoric improvements will be worth much if not carried over to the playoffs, where Utah fell short in a classic seven-game first round game against the Denver Nuggets last season (its second consecutive round of the first round of expulsion). And in that regard, our complete model – which takes into account the team’s talent and various post-season effects – is a little less convinced (giving Utah an 18% chance in the title) than our pure Elo model (29 %).

Even so, that 18% probability is the second best in the league now, behind only the Clippers. And in its more immediate future, Jazz will also have another regular season set-up against a star-studded Western Conference contender (in the form of falling Lakers) on Wednesday. With that, it will come one more chance to show how impressive Utah’s internal improvement has been so far this season.

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