It was a surprisingly long month that the Utah Jazz just spent without their starting power forward, Derrick Favors. The team went 7-9 in his absence, which is virtually the same winning percentage that the team was holding down when Favors was playing — only, the Jazz let winnable games against competition like the Minnesota Timberwolves, Charlotte Hornets and Portland Trail Blazers get away from them. With Favors back in the lineup, the Jazz beat both the Timberwolves and Hornets this week, which helps to illustrate Favors’s positive effect on the team.
Favors was limited to 20 minutes in two of the three games he played in his return, but the results have been massive: in just over 75 combined minutes from him, Utah has outscored its opponents by 44 points.
What I’ve found especially encouraging about Favors’s return is his revitalized focus and efficiency on offense. Before this three-game stint, he was shooting 52.3 percent on the season and scoring 0.51 points per minute. This week, he’s gone up to 60.6 percent and 0.6 points per minute.
Favors’s offensive acuity on back-to-back possessions at the start of the fourth quarter against the Hornets forced opposing coach Steve Clifford to call timeout a minute after the quarter started. First, there was Favors slowly but surely dominating rookie Frank Kaminsky in the post:
Pretty old school, right? But Favors isn’t simply lost in the modern, spaced-out NBA. On the very next possession, the Jazz dialed up the exact same play. This time, look at how he even seemed to anticipate the open pass before he actually turned his head to see it:
Favors also worked very elegantly in the pick-and-roll throughout the game. Here’s an example from the first quarter working with Gordon Hayward. The body control, as Favors ducked around the help defender, looks easy the way he did it (even though that’s far from the difficult nature of the move):
And here he was late in the game, working with Rodney Hood:
This season in the NBA there are 25 players who are what I’ll call “ultra-heavy roll men” — or, they’ve ended a possession (with either a shot, free throws or turnover) as the roll man in a pick-and-roll on over 100 plays this season. Favors ranks eighth among them in points per possession, at 1.08. This is a talent that even skilled players can struggle with: the bottom five players in the rankings are Nikola Vucevic, Pau Gasol, Kevin Love, Blake Griffin and LaMarcus Aldridge.
At 21-25 and dancing around the fringes of the playoff race, the Jazz season can look underwhelming on the surface. Really, though, missing Favors — and also Rudy Gobert — for a month apiece has obscured Utah’s excellent performance when the full team is healthy. Favors and Gobert have only played in 16 games together this season, and the team has gone 9-7 in those games, or noticeably better than their regular record. What’s more, those 16 games came against a brutally tough schedule (mostly in November): Utah’s seven losses were to the Detroit Pistons (twice), Portland Trail Blazers, Cleveland Cavaliers, Dallas Mavericks, Oklahoma City Thunder and Golden State Warriors.
Plus: in the 300+ minutes that Favors and Gobert have shared the floor together, the Jazz are outscoring opponents by 6.6 points per 100 possessions, per Basketball-Reference.com. The team’s “healthy” starting lineup (with Dante Exum out for the season) of Gobert, Favors, Hayward, Hood and Raul Neto has only played 164 total minutes this season — and they’re outscoring the opposition by 9.4 points per 100 possessions.
With Favors and Gobert back from injury, the Jazz look to be in prime position to get that last playoff spot in the Western Conference.
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Ross Jamal Pusey