Jazz need better PG, for frontcourt's sake


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SALT LAKE CITY — The Jazz now have a dilemma.

Dante Exum's ACL tear means that they'll be without their presumptive starting point guard for likely the entire 2015-16 season, leaving a trio of Trey Burke, Bryce Cotton and Raul Neto at the point guard position.

That's not brilliant. The Jazz already had league-worst production at point guard last season, and unless you're betting on large leaps of improvement from all three, it will continue to be nearly league worst next season unless changes are made. Exum wasn't great last season, certainly, but he represented Utah's best chance at league-average production from the point guard spot next season.

The Jazz's lack of starter-quality point guards really hurt the Jazz last year and was the biggest reason they didn't make the playoffs. Take a look at this chart, produced by HP Basketball writer Daniel Lewis:

By the metric Lewis used, WARP, the Jazz had the very best frontcourt in the entire NBA last season. The young and talented trio of Gordon Hayward, Derrick Favors and Rudy Gobert outpaced all of their competition in 2015-16, and now they deserve significant team success to match their efforts.

Meanwhile, the Jazz's backcourt was the very worst in the NBA last year. The shooting guard position clearly has a cause: the dual injuries of Alec Burks and Rodney Hood. With a healthy Burks and Hood, it's very reasonable to expect production to increase to league-average level at shooting guard.

Now, the three point guards who remain don't project to reach even average production next season. Having such a weak spot in the lineup for all 48 minutes of a game means defenses can play nearly 5-on-4 on defense, hurting the production and further development of Hayward, Favors and especially Gobert.

Burke shouldn't be playing starting minutes for an NBA team, based on what he showed last year. Burke is the first player in 50 years(!), since the 1964-65 season, to shoot more than 1,000 shots and make less than 37 percent of them. Burke's profligacy from the field last year, especially in the number of shots he hoisted, took opportunities away from his more efficient teammates.

Burke led the Jazz in shots per minute last year, and at no point did he have the self-awareness to stop shooting: even when he and Hayward shared the floor last season, Burke still shot 10 percent more than Hayward did, despite shooting at a lower percentage on literally every type of shot.

Burke's defense did improve over the last half of the season to about average, and he's now probably underrated in that aspect of the game. Burke's not a disruptor like Exum can be defensively, but he became a lot more solid when he wasn't having to cover up the mistakes of the defenders behind him.

Burke's not hopeless to improve. This will be just his third year, and point guards sometimes do take time. But his lack of physical tools significantly limits his ceiling, probably below the caliber of impactful NBA starter.

Meanwhile, Bryce Cotton is a fringe NBA player, one I'd feel pretty uncomfortable giving a big role to. While he is a better shooter than Burke as evidenced by his NBA and D-League numbers, he's not much of a distributor, even at the D-League level. Furthermore, his defense leaves, and will continue to leave, a lot to be desired: his size means that he can't defend shots well, and he is vulnerable to being picked off too easily.

Raul Neto is the latest acquisition at point guard by the Jazz, and while he is promising long-term, he still has a lot of work to go. In particular, he couldn't shoot the ball at all last year in Spain, making just 20 percent of his shots from the shorter 3-point line. His best-case scenario is probably somewhere similar to Ricky Rubio: a flashy facilitating point guard who can't really score on his own. While the facilitation helps his teammates out, the lack of spacing provided will really hurt the offense. His most likely output for this season, though, probably won't reach Rubio levels.

Smart teams will by-and-large dare Burke, Cotton and Neto to shoot until they prove that they can make shots. The Jazz's offense will bog down, and teams will go under screens and pack the paint against the roll game of Favors and Gobert. With no spacing, the Jazz may even turn over the ball more than they did last season, leading to dangerous transition opportunities the other way. And with all three candidates somewhere between unproven to below average on defense, the defense will probably suffer compared to the stifling end to the season last year.

But it's not even the output next season that should worry the Jazz, but the development successes lost. Gobert won't be in the position with the ball to even try his newly developed floater. Burks won't be able to show off his improved finishing when he runs into multiple defenders in the paint. Hood's burgeoning pick-and-roll game will be stifled with an extra man helping. It's really useful for young players to see what they practice on being successful in games, and it's not clear that they'll be able to when seeing that much help thrown their way. It'll be a bummer.

Furthermore, Hayward has the opportunity to opt out of his contract in 2017, an option he'll almost certainly take, if only to make more money. If the Jazz don't compete now, they'll have just one season to put together a winning team in order to keep him on board. That's a lot of risk on one season.

To be clear, the free agency market for point guards is very bare right now. The best point guard left on the market is probably Norris Cole, and it's not clear that he'd be an upgrade over any of the Jazz's three current players. Kendall Marshall is also available, and may be a decent stopgap PG as a player who can facilitate and make open 3s.

But an acquisition will probably have to occur in the trade market, and there might be players available there. Darren Collison has likely been relegated to backup point guard after the Sacramento Kings signed Rajon Rondo. Collison is a solid shooter and passer: the kind of offensive player that defenders couldn't cheat on. Jose Calderon is a defensive sieve, but has a contract that the Knicks want to get rid of, and the Jazz could easily take on. He, too, is a great shotmaker and facilitator, though age is a serious concern. The Dallas Mavericks also have a point guard glut now that they've signed Deron Williams, so much so that they have three point guards who were all born on the same date: June 26, 1984. They may want to find a taker for one. Jody Genessy reported that Garrett Temple of the Washington Wizards is of interest to the Jazz as a somewhat like-for-like replacement for Exum: a 6'6'' PG who is strong defensively, but not a great scorer.

The Jazz have the assets to make this happen. They have a total of five first-round picks and eight second-round picks over the next three seasons, and have the cap space to take on most of the players in this salary range.

It's time to use that space and those assets to improve the team, both for now and for the future.

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Andy Larsen

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